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These are a few of the things computer people were talking about in 2005: PHISHING, CLICK FRAUD, ZOMBIES, DARKNETS, MASHUPS, DUAL CORES, HOTSPOTS, and TEXTING.
In 2005 people were the most wirelessly connected ever. Cellular phones were the most common electronic gadget in the world, with about 700 million expected to be sold globally in 2005. According to research firm Gartner Inc., annual sales were expected to climb to one billion cellular phones by 2009, which meant that 40% of the world's population would be using cellular phones. Adding to the appeal of the phones were features that also made them function as digital cameras or digital music players. They were also widely used as text-messaging devices. (See Sidebar.)
In another sign of things to come, it appeared that technology jobs were losing their lustre as demand for programmers declined. Some experts forecast a 30% decline worldwide in technology jobs by 2010. In the United States workers grew wary of seeking careers in engineering as corporate outsourcing sent tens of thousands of such jobs to other countries where wages were lower. Gartner predicted that as many as 15% of high-technology workers would leave that job category by the end of the decade, not including reductions due to natural attrition.
Identity theft was a growing Internet problem during 2005. Computer hackers had grown adept at stealing credit-card numbers and associated personal information from e-commerce businesses and financial institutions and then selling that data online. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimated that such theft cost American consumers $5 billion and American business $48 billion each year.
There was an increase in reported breaches of security in commerce and banking Web sites, although the rise appeared to be related to new U.S. government rules that required federal banks, state-chartered banks, and savings-and-loan institutions to tell customers if their personal information had been compromised and subject to misuse. The Bank of America introduced a new security system for online banking in an attempt to recover from some embarrassing security failures. In February the bank revealed that it had lost computer tapes that contained the personal information of some 1.2 million employees of the U.S. government, and in May the Bank of America and Wachovia had to alert more than 100,000 customers after nine persons, including seven bank employees, were charged with trying to steal financial information belonging to customers. Another security breach was reported by MasterCard International, which disclosed that 40 million credit-card and debit-card numbers had possibly been obtained by someone outside the company who had gained access to the information via a firm that processed credit-card transactions. Clothing retailer Polo Ralph Lauren suffered data theft that might have affected 180,000 persons who held General Motors-branded MasterCards. The information-database firm LexisNexis reported that the personal data of 310,000 people may have been revealed inadvertently since early 2003, and competitor ChoicePoint said that fraud perpetrators who posed as businessmen had accessed data from about 145,000 persons.
Computer security experts blamed the leaks on several things, including the growth of data collection as a business, the poor design of software and security systems, and the lack of corporate oversight. U.S. investigators confirmed that corporations were still reluctant to report security breaches. An annual survey by the FBI and the private Computer Security Institute reported that in 2004 only about 20% of businesses were willing to report computer intrusions, a number that had changed little from previous years. Corporations feared that the disclosure of computer attacks would harm their public image and help their competitors, the FBI said.
The semiannual Internet Security Threat Report issued by the California-based security firm Symantec said that the motives of hackers appeared to have shifted from engaging in malicious behaviour (such as creating Internet viruses and worms) to seeking monetary gain, primarily through information theft. Such theft often was accomplished by means of "phishing" or "spyware." In phishing a bogus e-mail message was typically used to direct a consumer to a Web site that mimicked the appearance of a familiar bank or e-commerce Web site. Consumers were then asked to "update" or "confirm" their accounts and unwittingly disclosed confidential information such as Social Security numbers or credit-card numbers. Some types of spyware were designed to steal Social Security numbers, passwords, and other private information directly from the computer's hard drive, while others altered the results of Internet searches in order to surreptitiously redirect computer users to a Web site that would infect their PCs with even more spyware. Internet scam artists were willing to pay spyware creators for these tasks, and security-software firm Webroot Software estimated that spyware generated about $2.4 billion in annual revenue for its perpetrators. Companies and law-enforcement agencies tried to fight back with lawsuits. The state of New York sued an Internet marketer for allegedly installing spyware and adware (software that displayed unwanted pop-up advertisements) on consumer PCs. Microsoft filed 117 civil lawsuits that sought to learn the identities of people who were believed to have perpetrated phishing attempts against the customers of its Hotmail e-mail service and MSN Internet service.
Internet auction fraud was on the rise in 2005. The FTC annual report stated that complaints of such crimes over the period 2002–04 had nearly doubled. Old-fashioned fraud also prospered on the Web. Hurricane Katrina generated a wave of Internet scams that involved raising money for fake relief efforts. Spam, or junk e-mail, continued to be an enormous problem for e-mail users. Spam made up 69% of all e-mail traffic in mid-2005, up from 50% in 2003. Microsoft said that it had settled a suit it had filed against alleged spam distributor Scott Richter and his Colorado firm, OptInRealBig.com. Richter and the firm agreed to pay Microsoft $7 million.
A much different kind of fraud troubled some Internet advertisers. Called "click fraud," it involved trying to harm Internet advertisers financially by repeatedly clicking on an Internet ad, either manually or by means of a malicious computer program. Such tactics drove up the cost of Internet advertising, since each click required the advertiser to make a payment to the owner of the Web page where the ad appeared. Likely perpetrators were said to be unhappy employees, companies that were trying to boost the ad costs of their rivals, and disreputable Web-site operators seeking to boost their revenues from advertising.
Internet service providers (ISPs) came under increasing pressure from the computer industry to rid their networks of zombies (computers that had been taken over by hackers for the purpose of launching Web-site attacks or phishing scams). The FTC promised to provide ISPs with reports of zombie PCs on their networks and asked that ISPs quarantine those machines and help customers cleanse them of infections. Some ISPs already offered their customers virus- and spam-filtering services, spyware-detection software, and firewall protection. A few also tried to regulate the outflow of e-mail from their networks in order to limit spam.
In June the British government said that there had been "industrial-scale" attacks aimed at stealing valuable data from computer networks across Britain and that their origin had not been determined. Over several months the attackers mounted assaults on government and private-sector computer systems in such fields as communications, energy, finance, health, and transportation.
A German teenager received a suspended sentence in 2005 for having created the Sasser computer worm, which in 2004 caused thousands of computers running Microsoft's Windows 2000 or Windows XP operating systems to crash and also slowed Internet traffic. Sven Jaschan, 19, was found guilty of computer sabotage and illegal alteration of data. The celebrated case of who hacked hotel heiress Paris Hilton's cellular phone appeared solved when a Massachusetts teenager pleaded guilty in the incident. The crime was widely reported because revealing photographs and celebrity contact information from the hacked device were posted online. The 17-year-old perpetrator, who was not identified, was sentenced to 11 months of detention and two years of supervised release without access to the Internet. A British man, Gary McKinnon, was arrested in 2005 for allegedly having hacked into U.S. military computer networks in 2001 and 2002, but he sought to avoid extradition to the United States. Prosecutors said that he had caused $700,000 in damages by illegally gaining access to 97 U.S. government computers, the largest such effort on record.
The issue of levying sales taxes on goods purchased online, which had been largely avoided in the United States for fear of stunting e-commerce, was raised again by a California appeals court decision that found an online bookseller liable for taxes for portions of the years 1998 and 1999 because the firm had combined its stores and online subsidiary in the state. In 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that online retailers did not have to collect taxes unless the customer was in a state where the retailer had physical operations. The bookseller, Borders, insisted that it was protected under the 1992 ruling because its online operations and California bookstores were run by separate corporate entities. The California court disagreed and said that the two business units had worked together and therefore were not protected under the Supreme Court ruling. The California court decision led states once again to press for changes in the tax law, which they claimed unfairly deprived them of an estimated $15 billion a year in tax revenue on Internet sales.
Digital music was flourishing in 2005. Digital music players, which were also referred to as digital audio players, seemed to be everywhere, with about 95 million expected to be sold worldwide during the year. Early in 2005 a study showed that 22 million U.S. adults—about 11% of the population—owned a digital music player.
APThe iPod digital music player continued to drive Apple Computer's financial performance; the company's profit more than quadrupled, to $430 million, in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year. Analysts were surprised by the continued unit-sales growth for the product. At midyear the iPod accounted for about three-fourths of the digital music players sold in the United States, analysts said. Apple continued to roll out a steady stream of advances, including the iPod Nano players (which were much smaller than previous full-featured iPod models because they used flash memory instead of disk drives), a video iPod that could display music videos or TV shows, and a telephone equipped with Apple's iTunes software, manufactured by Motorola. Apple also settled a class-action suit brought on behalf of an estimated 1.4 million consumers who had battery problems with iPods purchased through May 2004. The settlement gave consumers $50 vouchers for use in purchasing Apple products and extended service warranties.
The war against music piracy continued. File-sharing Web sites that aided the free trading of copyrighted music files lost key court decisions that left them open to further legal action by the music industry. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the creators of the Grokster and Morpheus file-sharing services could be considered liable for contributing to copyright infringement through the trading of copyrighted songs, even if their services had some legal uses. Grokster abruptly shut down in early November as part of a settlement with the recording industry. An Australian court ruled that Kazaa, another free file-sharing network, violated Australian copyright law. The music industry continued its practice of trying to curb online file sharing by suing consumers. By mid-2005 the number of suits filed over several years had reached a cumulative total of nearly 12,000, although many of the lawsuits had not yet been resolved. The research firm Yankee Group estimated that about 5 billion songs were downloaded via free file-sharing services in 2004, whereas authorized online music stores sold about 330 million songs in the same period. Moreover, the music industry's lawsuits were not always successful. Two universities in North Carolina invoked the right to privacy and successfully resisted attempts by the music industry to learn the identities of two students who allegedly shared copyrighted music on the Internet through university networks. North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said that they did not condone music piracy but that student privacy rights were more important.
Another threat to the music companies was the development of what were termed "darknets," a type of peer-to-peer file-sharing network that allowed participants to share information with far more anonymity than other file-sharing networks. The networks linked trusted members of a group and protected their communication with encryption techniques.
Other efforts were being made to prevent Internet piracy from carrying over into the world of movies. A new U.S. law sought to discourage the illegal trading of motion pictures over the Internet by providing penalties of up to three years in prison for persons who secretly videotaped films in movie theatres. Copies of movies illegally taped in theatres, together with prerelease copies surreptitiously given out by industry insiders, were said to be the chief sources of new films that were available online via file-sharing services. Meanwhile, Hollywood studios prepared to allow consumers to buy and download a wide selection of movies over the Internet, partly because they feared that the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections would increase piracy if there was not a legal alternative.
An effort by Sony BMG records to protect music CDs from unauthorized copying backfired when the copy-protection software included on the CDs came to be perceived as malicious. When played on the user's PC, the CDs automatically installed software that spied on the user's music-listening habits and opened the PC to computer-virus attacks. Attempts to remove the software left the operating system damaged. Sony offered a software patch, but experts said the patch also created PC security problems. Sony then announced that it would stop using the copy-protection software, remove three million CDs that incorporated the software from store shelves, and recall the two million such CDs that already had been sold.
Cable TV companies that offered high-speed cable modem Internet access gained a big advantage over their telephone industry rivals. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the cable firms did not have to open up their networks to rival ISPs that wanted to reach customers via the cable network. The ruling was based on the idea that cable TV companies provided a high-speed "information service," which was mostly unregulated by law, whereas telephone companies offered a high-speed "telecommunications service," which was regulated. The ruling disappointed consumer groups pressing for more commercial competition in high-speed Internet access and further limited the ability of slower dial-up ISPs to reach a wider audience by purchasing broadband access through the high-speed network of another company.
Cable TV's Internet rivals, the big telephone companies, also won a big victory when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that they no longer had to provide competing ISPs with access to their lines at discounted rates. The FCC said that it believed the move would speed the growth of DSL (digital subscriber line) broadband service by giving telephone companies more incentives to upgrade their networks. Some consumer groups, however, said that the move would limit competition for broadband service and result in higher prices. The FCC said that the rule change would take effect in one year.
Legal and political action played a large role in determining the direction being taken by computer technology. A preliminary court decision limited the liability of nearly 300 technology companies that went public during the 1990s dot-com boom. The decision had the effect of diverting the wrath of investors who claimed they had been defrauded by the companies toward a group of 55 investment banks that allegedly provided favoured clients with stock from popular initial public stock offerings. Under the arrangement the companies would not have to pay if the investors recovered more than $1 billion from the investment banks. If they recovered less, the companies would have to pay the difference.
Microsoft continued its long-running fight with the European Union over its antitrust suit. Microsoft was ordered in 2004 to change the way it sold software in European countries and to pay a fine of €497 million (about $613 million), but Microsoft appealed. In 2005, as required, Microsoft introduced a version of Windows that did not include Windows Media Player, a move designed to prevent Microsoft from having an unfair advantage over other companies that sold music and video players for PCs, but Microsoft also filed a lawsuit against the European Commission over the antitrust issues. For its part the European Commission said that it had received new complaints about Microsoft that could result in a new anticompetition case against the software industry giant.
The Google Print Library Project—Google's plan to digitize the world's library books and put them online—ran into trouble, first from opposition by France and then from lawsuits by authors and publishers who were concerned about copyright infringement that could result from the unauthorized duplication and distribution of book content. French government officials, fearing that their language and culture might take a backseat under the Google plan, said that France should devise its own plan to put library collections online. The Authors Guild, which represented 8,000 writers, filed a class-action suit that alleged copyright infringement; the suit sought an injunction against the Google project and monetary damages. The Association of American Publishers, which represented five book publishers, sued Google and sought an injunction against the project to halt alleged copyright infringement. Google said that although millions of copyrighted books from five large libraries would be digitized, copyright holders could opt out of having their books scanned and, in any event, only a few sentences at a time from any book still under copyright would be viewable by readers on the Internet. No printing or downloading of the books would be allowed.
The FBI said that it had lost about $104 million on a major computer-system upgrade project that failed and that a replacement computer system would not be ready until the end of 2006. Virtual Case File, an automated case-management system, was to have cost a total of $170 million, but it was abandoned in 2005 after the FBI concluded that it was already outdated and that its performance did not meet expectations. A Department of Justice (DOJ) report said that the computer-technology problems at the FBI could affect national security.
A federal audit of the controversial E-rate program that funded Internet connections for American schools and libraries found that the $2.25-billion-a-year effort was plagued by fraud and abuse. Investigators blamed some of the schools and libraries that were recipients of the money and some of the companies that provided them with Internet connections. Investigators also said that the FCC failed to provide good oversight for the program's operation.
Google's strong financial results reflected the rapid growth of Internet advertising in general and Google's popularity in particular. The company's third-quarter profits increased 700%, and analysts attributed part of that success to a shift in advertising spending toward the Internet and away from traditional media, including newspapers, magazines, and television. Google also became the most highly valued media company in the world, with a stock-market capitalization of more than $90 billion. A new Google technology effort captured public attention; the Google Earth service allowed people to call up on their PC screens detailed satellite images of major cities and overlay them with information as diverse as street names, crime statistics, or coffee-shop locations. Microsoft later introduced a similar online service called Virtual Earth. Some users of the online satellite images devised "mashups," in which they overlaid the images with information of their choosing, such as real-estate prices, movie filming locations, and sites where unidentified flying objects (UFOs) allegedly had been seen. Mashups proved useful to some Hurricane Katrina evacuees, who used their computers to see whether their homes had been damaged by the storm.
Carleton S. Fiorina resigned as CEO of computer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard after the board of directors asked her to do so. The resignation revolved around problems within Hewlett-Packard in the three years since she successfully completed the company's controversial merger with computer manufacturer Compaq. Among the issues facing the company was an internal debate over whether it should be broken into smaller firms—a move she had opposed—and complaints that her strategies for the company were not being executed well. Fiorina, who had been a high-profile CEO since taking the job in 1999, also was one of the best-known women executives in the U.S., where she was the first woman to head one of the 20 largest publicly owned companies. Under successor CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard said that it would lay off 14,500 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, in 2005 and 2006. The company also froze its pension plan for employees not yet vested in it. The two-pronged plan was intended to save the company about $1.9 billion annually beginning in 2007. Meanwhile, Dell, the eponymous PC company founded by Michael Dell , showed record earnings in early 2005.
Microsoft settled the last of the big antitrust suits that it faced in the U.S. by agreeing to pay RealNetworks $761 million. Chief among RealNetworks' claims was that Microsoft had used its dominant position in operating systems to promote its free Windows Media Player, which hurt sales of the RealNetworks Real Player software. Earlier in the year, Microsoft had settled claims brought by IBM for $850 million and settled antitrust and other claims brought by Gateway for $150 million over four years. Microsoft had cleared accounts with Sun Microsystems in 2004 and AOL in 2003. Microsoft settled another antitrust suit by agreeing to pay Burst.com $60 million. Burst had sued Microsoft in 2002 over alleged antitrust violations and patent infringement related to Burst's video-playing software; Microsoft had denied the claims. Burst alleged that its technology and trade secrets were improperly used in Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Computer-chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) sued microprocessor industry leader Intel for alleged antitrust violations, including claims that Intel threatened to retaliate against companies that purchased from AMD. Intel denied doing anything wrong and claimed that AMD's problems were of its own making. Both companies remained at the forefront of chip technology, introducing new microprocessors using "dual core" technology, which was designed to combat the problem of heat generated by computer chips inside computers. As the speed of traditional chips increased, their heat output had risen to the point that the need to dissipate it had become a serious problem. The dual-core chips used two processors on a chip, each running at a speed slow enough to keep temperatures manageable.
Time Warner was poised to pay $2.4 billion to settle a class-action suit based on allegations of fraudulent business practices at AOL, both before and after it merged with Time Warner in 2001. Time Warner earlier had agreed to pay $300 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle civil fraud charges related to the improper inflation of AOL revenues and to pay $150 million to settle an investigation by the DOJ. AOL laid off hundreds of employees and repositioned itself as a group of free Web sites rather than a proprietary online service. Time Warner reportedly was negotiating to sell an interest in AOL to one of three suitors, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! All were interested in the 112 million unique monthly visitors that AOL could bring to their advertising-supported Web sites.
IBM showed improved earnings while it completed the sale of its PC business to Lenovo of China, settled an antitrust case it had filed against Microsoft, and laid off 13,000 employees, most of them in Europe. Analysts believed that the company's stronger financial results showed that corporate spending on information technology, which had been in a lull, was increasing slowly. IBM also bought software company Ascential Software for $1.1 billion; Ascential's software helped organize large quantities of raw data for business customers.
Apple dropped IBM and Freescale Semiconductor as its longtime suppliers of the computer chips used in Macintosh computers in favour of Intel, whose microprocessors were also used in Windows-based computers. Amazon.com, with an eye on the popularity of downloaded music, said that it would download short literary works to online customers for 49 cents each. The book industry was divided over whether the downloads, called Amazon Shorts, posed a threat or boon to traditional publishers.
Howard Stringer, Sony's new CEO and its first top executive from outside Japan, promised to improve the firm's electronics division, which had been badly hurt by competing consumer electronics products, including Apple's iPod music player, and by declining prices for items such as digital cameras. The electronics business contributed about two-thirds of Sony's revenue. When Apple introduced new iPod models late in the year, Sony said that it intended to challenge Apple's dominance in digital music players. Sony also announced it would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a reorganization, however, and that it expected to lose about $90 million in the fiscal year ending in March 2006. Sony had earlier predicted a profit of $90 million.
Oracle bought Siebel Systems, which made software for managing customer relationships, for $5.85 billion. It was part of Oracle's continuing effort to be a consolidator in the business software market; Oracle said that the Siebel acquisition would make it the world's leader in that field. Oracle's biggest rival was the German business software company SAP. The relatively quiet acquisition of Siebel was less than a year after Oracle's year-and-a-half pursuit and hostile takeover of business software firm PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. Early in 2005 Oracle outbid SAP for Retek, a retail-oriented business software maker, for which Oracle paid $643.3 million.
Sun Microsystems acquired Storage Technology for $4.1 billion in cash. Analysts said that Sun was trying to revitalize its business by strengthening its storage capabilities, which was likely to please corporate customers concerned about the long-term storage and security of data. Sun's revenue had reached a peak in 2001 and had lost money the next three years on diminished revenues.
Adobe Systems, creator of the Acrobat document-and-graphics software, acquired Macromedia, a multimedia firm, for $3.4 billion in stock. The deal promised a combined firm with both document-sharing and Web-design capabilities.
There was a consolidation in the online brokerage business as online trading continued a two-year decline. Ameritrade bought TD Waterhouse for an estimated $3 billion. E*Trade Financial Corp. paid $700 million in cash for competitor Harrisdirect. The deals were made in the belief that size would be a key factor in determining which companies prospered.
In an unusual purchase of a technology firm by private investors, Agilent Technologies sold its semiconductor business for $2.66 billion to two equity companies, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake Partners. At the same time, Agilent, itself a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard five years earlier, said that it would spin off its chip-testing operations as two companies in 2006.
EBay bought Internet phone company Skype Technologies of Luxembourg for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock, although that amount could rise based on performance, the companies said. Skype software users could talk over the Internet for free, using their PCs instead of phones. The company also offered a premium service that allowed PC users to make calls to and receive calls from traditional telephones. EBay made the acquisition after Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! began to offer online phone-calling services.
IAC/InterActiveCorp, the owner of travel Web site Expedia as well as television's Home Shopping Network, bought search engine company Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion. While most search engine Web sites searched for key words or phrases, Ask Jeeves was designed to search for answers to specific questions.
DoubleClick, an Internet marketing firm, was acquired for $1.1 billion by Hellman & Friedman LLC, a firm that specialized in buying out media companies. Despite a sharp increase in spending for online advertising, competition between firms that provided Internet ads to Web sites had driven down prices and left DoubleClick in a commodity market, some analysts said.
In 2005 the United States insisted that it would indefinitely retain control of a group of Internet "root servers," which acted as traffic directors for PCs navigating the Web. The move was a departure from previous U.S. policy and came at a time when many nations favoured putting an international body in charge of overseeing the root servers. The U.S. government said that its decision was both a response to security threats and a way of ensuring Internet dependability for communications and business, but some countries believed that the United States was improperly tightening its grip on the Internet. In the end an international forum was created to discuss Internet issues, but the U.S. remained in control of the Internet's address system.
A resolution was reached in a long-running dispute between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an Internet oversight group, and VeriSign, the company whose computers controlled much of the flow of traffic destined for Internet addresses that ended in ".com" and ".net." VeriSign in 2003 created a service that provided Web surfers who misspelled an Internet address with suggestions about what they might have intended to type. Because VeriSign sometimes profited from directing traffic to some of the Web sites it suggested, ICANN pressured the company to halt the service. VeriSign then sued ICANN on the grounds of business interference. ICANN and VeriSign reached a settlement that extended VeriSign's control of the ".com" addresses an extra five years beyond the existing 2007 contract expiration date but gave ICANN the right to review new services that might affect the Internet's address system.
Bloggers, persons who published personal opinions at their own Internet addresses, continued to gain more recognition and, in some cases, instant fame. A number of bloggers became self-appointed public watchdogs, and a few were credited with precipitating the resignations of prominent persons in the mainstream news media, such as Dan Rather, who quit the CBS Evening News several months after bloggers exposed flaws in a major news story that he had reported. Some observers, however, feared that blogs (a shortened form of the words Web logs) gave individuals the power of the press without the accompanying accountability for accuracy and fairness. Some blog-oriented businesses that specialized in "social networking" became hugely successful. MySpace.com, begun in 2003 as a social network in which members could share their likes and dislikes about popular music, attracted more than 30 million members, many of them aged 14 to 20. In 2005 the Internet traffic of MySpace rose 840% over the previous year, and News Corp. acquired MySpace's parent company, Intermix Media, for about $580 million.
High-speed Internet access, also called broadband, continued to spread and grow in popularity. The extent to which broadband had become established in a country was viewed by some as a measurement of the country's preparedness for the future. South Korea ranked first in broadband use as a percentage of its population, whereas the United States ranked 12th, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In terms of the number of broadband users, however, the United States ranked first and South Korea was third. In the U.S., broadband service was not evenly distributed, and because of costs the rollout of broadband service sometimes skipped over areas that were too lightly populated, too distant from network equipment, or—some charged—too poor to afford the service. A few large U.S. cities planned their own broadband networks to make certain their entire population would be served. Philadelphia sought to construct a network using Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity technology, to cover the entire city (350 sq km [135 sq mi]) with wireless broadband service. In San Francisco the establishment of a city wireless Internet network was opposed by commercial broadband providers—telephone and cable TV companies. Broadband services that transmitted data signals over electrical power lines became available in a small number of U.S. cities, but questions remained whether that form of broadband service would be economically viable.
Wi-Fi hotspots, which functioned as short-range wireless links to a broadband Internet connection, proliferated in coffee shops, bookstores, hotels, and airports. Some hotspots offered free connections; others required a payment. The business of providing Wi-Fi for a fee proved to be less profitable than originally thought, and many commercial providers who sought to charge consumers for Wi-Fi underwent a consolidation. Security software firm McAfee acquired Wireless Security; networking firm Cisco Systems bought Wi-Fi firm Airespace; and electronics giant Siemens AG acquired Chantry Networks.
APThe game industry prepared for the next generation of video-game consoles. Microsoft's new Xbox 360 debuted in late 2005, but the competing Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution consoles were not expected to reach consumers until mid-2006. Microsoft hoped to pull ahead of Sony by introducing its game console earlier; in the previous generation of consoles, the Sony PlayStation 2 outsold the Microsoft Xbox nearly four to one, with Nintendo's GameCube coming in third. In the handheld video-game market, the Nintendo DS and various Game Boy models from Nintendo got some competition from Sony's new handheld unit, the PlayStation Portable, which was dubbed the PSP.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the latest in a series of controversial video games known for their casual attitude toward violence, had its rating changed from "mature" to "adults only" after a controversy erupted over sexually oriented material that was found hidden in the game's code. (Games rated "mature" could be purchased by those 17 or older; games rated "adults only" could be purchased only by persons 18 or older.) Hackers discovered they could unlock hidden animated sex scenes that had been part of the game during its development but had been eliminated before the game was introduced by its creator, Rockstar Games. The hackers then used the Internet to distribute the code that unlocked the sex scenes. The code was widely downloaded, which created an outcry in Congress and prompted the Entertainment Software Rating Board to change the rating of the game. As a result, many retailers removed the game from their shelves, which dealt a financial blow to Rockstar, whose Grand Theft Auto series of video games had collectively sold more than 21 million copies over four years. Rockstar later offered a software patch for the game that disabled the code for the sex scenes, and it also released a new mature-rated version of the game.
A battle over standards threatened to disrupt the introduction in 2006 of next-generation DVD players that would be able to play high-definition TV programs and movies. It was feared that consumers might be reluctant to purchase next-generation players for fear that one of the two incompatible standards, Blu-ray from Sony and HD DVD from Toshiba, would lose out to the other and thereby render the purchase worthless. Movie studios faced a potentially expensive situation if they produced movies for the losing format. Computer and software firms such as Intel and Microsoft were concerned because new computers would need to have a DVD disk drive that used one or the other standard, since the technology would be a key to making PCs the centre of home multimedia networks. The first Toshiba HD DVD player was expected to appear in the U.S. in the spring of 2006, whereas the first Blu-ray DVD player to hit the American market would likely be the disk drive in Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console, which would probably ship in late 2006. Microsoft rechristened its upcoming version of Windows for consumers. The company changed the development codename, Longhorn, to its product name, Windows Vista. Microsoft promised security enhancements, better graphics, and new ways of searching for data. Vista was to be introduced in 2006, but test versions became available in mid-2005 as part of the company's efforts to refine the product before releasing it. Disk-drive manufacturers rushed to make smaller drives, which they hoped would be used in consumer devices such as cellular phones. Hitachi and Seagate Technologies developed drives with capacities of several gigabytes that used disks only 2.5 cm (1 in) in diameter. Anticipating that such consumer devices would sometimes accidentally be dropped, drive makers were developing motion-sensing technology for hard drives that would detect when the hard drive was falling. The technology would make it possible to move sensitive components of the drive into a safe position before impact. In another area of disk-drive technology, Toshiba was the first manufacturer to introduce a commercial disk drive that used "perpendicular recording," a method of orienting the magnetically recorded data on a disk in a way that dramatically increased storage capacity.
New Technology
A battle over standards threatened to disrupt the introduction in 2006 of next-generation DVD players that would be able to play high-definition TV programs and movies. It was feared that consumers might be reluctant to purchase next-generation players for fear that one of the two incompatible standards, Blu-ray from Sony and HD DVD from Toshiba, would lose out to the other and thereby render the purchase worthless. Movie studios faced a potentially expensive situation if they produced movies for the losing format. Computer and software firms such as Intel and Microsoft were concerned because new computers would need to have a DVD disk drive that used one or the other standard, since the technology would be a key to making PCs the centre of home multimedia networks. The first Toshiba HD DVD player was expected to appear in the U.S. in the spring of 2006, whereas the first Blu-ray DVD player to hit the American market would likely be the disk drive in Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console, which would probably ship in late 2006.
Microsoft rechristened its upcoming version of Windows for consumers. The company changed the development codename, Longhorn, to its product name, Windows Vista. Microsoft promised security enhancements, better graphics, and new ways of searching for data. Vista was to be introduced in 2006, but test versions became available in mid-2005 as part of the company's efforts to refine the product before releasing it.
Disk-drive manufacturers rushed to make smaller drives, which they hoped would be used in consumer devices such as cellular phones. Hitachi and Seagate Technologies developed drives with capacities of several gigabytes that used disks only 2.5 cm (1 in) in diameter. Anticipating that such consumer devices would sometimes accidentally be dropped, drive makers were developing motion-sensing technology for hard drives that would detect when the hard drive was falling. The technology would make it possible to move sensitive components of the drive into a safe position before impact. In another area of disk-drive technology, Toshiba was the first manufacturer to introduce a commercial disk drive that used "perpendicular recording," a method of orienting the magnetically recorded data on a disk in a way that dramatically increased storage capacity.


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Originally written on Next Impulse Sports | Last updated 11/17/14
Dwight Howard returned to Orlando for the first time since he left the squad and wasn't received in the most pleasant manner. He was greeted with a chorus of boo birds by the fans at the Amway Center but responded by dropping 21 points and 10 rebounds in the first half alone. He also made sure to take the time to blow a kiss to the crowd following a monster dunk early in the game. [USA Today] Article found on: Cosby Sweaters
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Federal Judge Confirms CAIR ~ Are Hamas Terrorists.
In Case There are Any Doubts…
- Hamas is a U.S. State Department–designated terrorist organization that professes to be a "Nation of Jihad".1, 2
- CAIR is a front organization of Hamas.3
- At least 54 Members of Congress are aiding, working with, taking money from and/or acting as a front for CAIR (i.e., Hamas, i.e., a U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization).4
- Last Lap Dance Of Obama, Gorbachev, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, And The 5-Year Plans Of Banksters!
- This Is What Happens When Leaders Decide To Be Puppets For The Rothschild Central Bankers!
- A Call To Justice Against The Rothschilds And All The Banking Zionists Of London Responsible For The NWO Chaos!


text:
Author(s): Stokey, Nancy L.
ISBN 10: 0691135053. See all ISBN's
Publisher: Princeton University Press
This is an eTextbook Learn More
In economic situations where action entails a fixed cost, inaction is the norm. Action is taken infrequently, and adjustments are large when they occur. Interest in economic models that exhibit ''lumpy'' behavior of this kind has exploded in recent years, spurred by growing evidence that it is typical in many important economic decisions, including price setting, investment, hiring, durable goods purchases, and portfolio management.
In The Economics of Inaction, leading economist Nancy Stokey shows how the tools of stochastic control can be applied to dynamic problems of decision making under uncertainty when fixed costs are present. Stokey provides a self-contained, rigorous, and clear treatment of two types of models, impulse and instantaneous control. She presents the relevant results about Brownian motion and other diffusion processes, develops methods for analyzing each type of problem, and discusses applications to price setting, investment, and durable goods purchases.
This authoritative book will be essential reading for graduate students and researchers in macroeconomics.
All ISBN's for this title:
ISBN 10: 0691135053, ISBN 13: 9780691135052, eISBN 10: 140082981X, eISBN 13: 9781400829811
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