neilhoughton.net

That’s a worldwide release date for both in-store purchases and digital downloads. EA has famously devoted an entire division (or “label”) to the blockbuster Sims franchise, in which players create their own families of virtual characters (or “sims”) and let their lives unfold. The game was designed by Will Wright, whose new game Spore is hitting stores next month.

New to The Sims 3 are more advanced customization features (including personality traits like kleptomania, paranoia, and clumsiness) and smarter “neighborhoods” that can more extensively affect the outcome of the game.

(Credit:
EA)

In addition to The Sims 3, EA will also be releasing a “collector’s edition” with a number of bonus features–including an in-game Italian sports
car.

Electronic Arts has announced that the third installation of The Sims, that game that rivals World of Warcraft in the “I got so addicted my boss almost fired me” department, will be debuting on February 20, 2009.

Boerries joined Yahoo four years ago and led its effort to bring its services to mobile phones and more recently TVs. News of his departure was first reported by Kara Swisher at All Things D on Wednesday, and Yahoo confirmed the departure.

In addition, Yahoo News chief Neeraj Khemlani is departing for Hearst.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

However, one source close to the situation said Boerries’ departure had more to do with Yahoo’s latest management reorganization under Chief Executive Carol Bartz, which is expected to be announced Thursday or Friday.

Marco Boerries, Yahoo's outgoing chief of mobile and TV efforts.

Marco Boerries, the chief of Yahoo’s Connected Life division, is leaving the company, Yahoo said Wednesday.

Swisher quoted Boerries’ good-bye memo as saying it’s been difficult for him to reconcile his personal and professional lives, given that his family lives in Germany.

In Word 2003, click the Labels button in the Mail Merge task pane and click Next. Now choose “Change document layout,” click Label Options, select the layout you prefer, and click OK. Choose “Next: Select recipients” at the bottom of the task pane.

Modify, sort, and filter your list of Outlook contacts before you create your mailing labels.

A friend asked if it’s possible to print a subset of the addresses in her Microsoft Outlook contacts as mailing labels. You would think that such a basic operation would be a breeze for an industrial-strength personal-information manager like Outlook. You would think wrong.

Instead, move the contacts whose addresses you want to print into a new folder in Outlook’s contact list. With your new contact folder in place, click Tools > Letters and Mailings > Mail Merge in Word 2003 or the Mail Merge tab on Word 2007’s ribbon.

In Word 2007, click Start Merge > Labels, select your label layout, click OK, and choose Select Recipients. In both versions, choose “Select from Outlook contacts,” click Choose Contacts Folder, and select the Outlook contact folder you just created.

In Word 2003, click “Next: Preview your labels,” and in Word 2007 click Preview Results. If you’re happy with the look of your labels, click “Next: Complete the merge” in Word 2003 or Finish & Merge in Word 2007. In Word 2003, leave All selected and choose Print. In Word 2007, click Print Documents. You can also choose to edit the contacts before you print them.

The first bit of counter-intuitivity is that you use Microsoft Word, not Outlook. If you use Outlook’s own mail-merge function by clicking Tools > Mail Merge, you get kicked into Word anyway. And every time I tried to run the resulting wizard, Word stalled in mid-process.

In the Mail Merge Recipients dialog box, you can uncheck any names you want to remove from the list, sort the list by any category, or filter it. When the list looks the way you want it, click OK.

In Word 2003, click “Next: Arrange your labels” and choose Address Block. In Word 2007, place the cursor in the first label and click Address Block. In both versions, make any necessary changes to the address layout and click OK. Now choose “Update all labels” in Word 2003 or Update Labels in Word 2007. The address block will appear in each label following “Next Record.”

(Credit:
Microsoft)

A shorter method of printing the addresses is to choose Directory rather than Labels in the Mail Merge task pane of Word 2003 or Word 2007’s Start Merge button. This places the addresses together in a single document, but you’ll probably have choose the Edit option before you print to clean up the resulting formatting.

An Intel executive demonstrated upcoming solid-state drives at this week’s Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, noting that the chipmaker is on track to deliver the drives later this year.

Meanwhile, an Intel fellow describes his “addiction” to solid-state drives in a blog posted Wednesday.

David Perlmutter, executive vice president/general manager of the mobility group, commented at IDF Shanghai on the input/output, or I/O, issues related to hard drives.

Intel currently offers small-capacity chip-level (what are called Thin Small Outline Packages or TSOPs) technology that provides end-product sizes ranging up to 16GB. But this modest line of products will get a big boost in the second quarter when Intel offers 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs ranging from 80GB to 160GB in capacity. Intel’s SSDs will compete with Samsung, for example, which is slated to bring out a 128GB SSD in the third quarter.

Knut Grimsrud, an Intel fellow who leads an R&D group responsible for developing new mainstream storage innovations, described in a blog the difference between using a hard drive and a solid-state drive.

“CPUs, graphics, and media chips have improved significantly year after year, but I/O remained very limited in performance,” Perlmutter, said. I/O refers to the data transfer speed of the hard drive. Even with the fastest processor in the world, he said, an I/O bottleneck can put a crimp on performance.

“I played the part of Guinea Pig and had one of our pre-production solid-state drives installed in my IT laptop…I was unprepared for the powerful instant high it gave my system,” he said in his blog. There was a “dramatic difference in how my system responded,” he noted.

Features of upcoming Intel solid-state drives

(Credit:
Intel) SSDs, if you don’t already know, are based on flash memory chip technology and have no moving parts. Hard-disk drives, in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, SSDs avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of hard drives. Therefore, SSDs are generally faster and more reliable. The catch is the cost: SSDs are currently much more expensive than hard drives.

Intel solid-state drives

Intel is expected to make an announcement about SSDs in the second quarter.

(Note: I can second Grimsrud’s statements. I own a SSD MacBook Air. Once you use an SSD and realize that there is a world without hard drive bottlenecks, a hard-drive-based system seems very old.)

(Credit:
Intel)

“Then the day came that my SSD was retrieved for data mining…and my original hard-disk was put back into my laptop. There’s no way to feel the pain quite as intensely as having to go back.”

Click here for more stories on IDF Shanghai.

Not just crowd-sourcing — it’s herd-sourcing!

You have probably seen how cows will tend to face together in the same direction in a field, usually to face head on into a wind (reduces heat loss) or sideways to the sun (maximize heat gain), but because the photos on Google Earth are so widespread and taken in generally good weather, it appears that cows have a “default setting” of north-south orientation when local conditions don’t override it.

My grandparents in England had cows on their farm so I’ve always had a lot of affection for them, and was delighted to read this story from the Los Angeles Times indicating a “hidden cow power.” Turns out cows may have internal compasses much like birds and bees do for orienting themselves to magnetic north.

Using satellite images on Google Earth, German scientists were able to see that all over the planet, cows stand with their bodies pointing to magnetic north.

As one of the researchers said, “This is an incredibly neat use of Google Earth. This is a study we would not have dreamed about doing five years ago.”

Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen and their colleagues found that two out of every three animals in the pictures were oriented in a direction roughly pointing to magnetic north.
The resolution of the images was not sufficient to tell which ends of the cows were pointing north, however.

However, the complicated process of finalizing the templates is taking longer than anyone expected. As stated in a status report released last week, the technical committee had to submit its own template design to Microsoft to work with because it was concerned the Redmond, Wash., company’s template was not well-designed.

He said the technical committee’s implementation group has been called off all other tasks to support the template effort, and the committee dedicated more than 150 hours to meetings about the templates just last week.

“What we have today is the (technical committee) and its staff spoon-feeding the world’s biggest PC company,” he said. “Something about that just isn’t right.”

“Something’s missing here, and I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what it is,” she said.

“I do appreciate that these things are complex, but I think it’s interesting the (technical committee) is able to do what’s necessary and bring Microsoft along, and not the other way around,” she said.

“I have to express my concern with this attitude that they’re behaving as a volunteer,” said Jay Himes, the antitrust bureau chief for the New York attorney general’s office. “It fosters this sort of grudging commitment to get the system documents done.”

Still, Kollar-Kotelly questioned Microsoft’s commitment.

WASHINGTON– Microsoft has made some progress developing a set of documents required as part of its antitrust consent decree, but the work could be accomplished much more quickly if the company took on a less grudging attitude, state and federal antitrust regulators said Thursday.

Muglia said the development of the system documents will undoubtedly go through next year, but that he could not present a final schedule for the project until the final template is completed. He said he could present a final schedule at the next status conference, slated for late January 2009.

The comments were made during a status conference meeting held to asses Microsoft’s compliance with the consent decree.

In June, regulators said that the “overview documents” Microsoft prepared did not sufficiently enable third-party licensees to create software interoperable with the company’s operating systems. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Microsoft had to create a set of additional “system” documents that would give more information on the interaction between the protocols in a number of scenarios.

“We understand that is a requirement,” said Charles Rule, an attorney for Microsoft. “The delays have not been as a result of Microsoft taking a lackadaisical attitude,”

Microsoft has been working with a court-appointed technical committee to create a set of templates for the system documents. So far, they have reached an agreement as to what the first template–which encompasses most of the system documents–should look like.

Representatives for Microsoft said the company is very committed to finishing the templates and the system documents. The company has assigned a significant number of senior engineers on the template project, said Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s senior vice president of servers and tools.

Kollar-Kotelly urged all parties to resolve their differences to finish the system documents by November 2009, when the consent decree is set to expire.

(Credit:
Apple)

Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior VP of software engineering, told WWDC 2008 attendees about Snow Leopard Monday afternoon.

The release will also come with a new version of Quicktime that improves video playback, and a faster version of
Safari. According to the reports, Apple expects to ship 10.6 “in about a year.”

Updated 3:44 p.m. PDT: Apple PR formally issued the press release in question that went out inadvertently earlier Monday.

Apple’s Bertrand Serlet was scheduled to address Apple’s developers in a session closed to the press Monday afternoon to go over 10.6, and now we have some idea of what he’s telling them; much to the chagrin of Apple PR, I suspect. Snow Leopard will improve support for multicore processors and allow developers to exploit powerful graphics processors, as we reported last week.

Scores of sites picked up on a press release that went out from Apple Canada and was pulled at some point after it went live. According to the release, Snow Leopard–which Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed is the code name for 10.6–will focus more on improving the basic plumbing of the operating system than adding any catchy new features, as The Unofficial Apple Weblog reported last week.

Apple quickly retracted a few
Mac OS X 10.6 tidbits leaked out by its Canadian subsidiary following the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, but the Internet misses nothing.

“There are really good reasons (to deploy Windows 7) for the business client. You’ve got compatibility mode that takes away that argument,” he said. “Security, power management. A lot of good reasons,” he said.

Maloney’s comments were focused on business, but he said “consumer will happen, too.”

“This time I think it will go faster,” said Sean Maloney, speaking Wednesday at the Intel Technology Summit.

He also addressed Netbooks saying that Netbooks will not attract first-time buyers. “The first time you buy something you want the real deal,” he said, referring to mainstream laptops. He also reiterated a recent Intel theme that Netbooks will become more of a market targeted at children.

Intel made a splash last year when it said there was “no compelling reason” for Intel’s IT department to upgrade to Windows Vista.

Intel sales chief Sean Maloney

(Credit:
Intel)

“There was a reason not to deploy Vista because you’re waiting for service pack X or (because of) compatibility issues,” he said.

Intel’s sales chief said Wednesday he expects
Windows 7 to deploy at a faster pace than Vista did.

Sunde Kolmisoppi has maintained the three founders haven’t owned the site since 2006. They transferred ownership to Reservella. The Motion Picture Industry Association of America claimed recently that the founders control Reservella. Sunde Kolmisoppi denied the allegations.

In June, Global Gaming Factory said it intended to acquire The Pirate Bay. Last week, the company’s CEO said the Swedish company has managed to find the funding needed to complete the sale. The transaction is supposed to go through sometime after August 27.

Last week, the Netherlands banned The Pirate Bay in that country and issued a threat that unless the site discontinues operation there, the operators will be fined $42,227. Also, a group representing copyright owners in Italy filed a $1 million copyright lawsuit.

For the past several years, Sunde Kolmisoppi has become the voice of the controversial BitTorrent tracking service that enabled millions to find and eventually download unauthorized copies of movies and other content. His departure follows a series of crushing legal setbacks for The Pirate Bay.

The music and film industries have alleged that The Pirate Bay was nothing more than a group of men who used technology to steal from artists and pocket the illegal proceeds for themselves.

Sunde Kolmisoppi suggested that he may return to the copyright/file-sharing debate one day. “It’s an important cause and I will not give the fight up.”

Last spring, a Swedish court found the Web site’s founders: Sunde Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, guilty of copyright violations. The three men were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages.

Our issues have “been raised to another level and it’s time for biological dispersal,” Sunde Kolmisoppi wrote. “At the same time, I have a feeling of being sessile when I need to be the most motile creature ever. The regeneration will continue with me in another place.

(Credit:
The Pirate Bay)

“I have decided to not be the spokesperson for The Pirate Bay anymore,” Sunde Kolmisoppi wrote in a blog post Monday. “The reasons are many, but most importantly it takes too much of my time. I want to build something new and I want to focus my energy in a different direction. I have projects waiting to be finished, a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read.”

Peter Sunde

(Credit:
Mats Lewan/CNET News)

Peter Sunde holds up a pretend IOU after The Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to a year in jail and fined more than $3 million.

Napster sowed the seeds of sharing unauthorized music files on the Web and The Pirate Bay harvested the hunger for free content by building a file-sharing community that extended across the globe, according to the founders. Among many young techies and hardcore Internet users, Sunde Kolmisoppi, Neij, and Warg are revered.

“Today marks the end of a small era for me, but I am simply leaving a role in order to be a person instead.”

Should the sale go through, copyright owners say they will try to seize any of the proceeds from the sale.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the three founders of The Pirate Bay, has stepped down as the site’s spokesman and has said he is moving on to new projects.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

What’s more, HP’s Netbook has a keyboard that’s just shy of full-size, meaning you can actually touch-type on it. (Too-small keyboards are one of my main gripes with Netbooks in general.) Even so, the 2133 measures just over an inch thick and weighs a mere 2.8 pounds. It comes with 512MB of RAM (enough for Linux), a 4GB SSD, an 8.9-inch screen, and a built-in Webcam. (See Amazon’s product page for full specs.)

In the market for a Netbook? Amazon has the baseline HP 2133 on sale for $299, down from $499. Right away that solves one of the HP’s main problems: its high price. Best of all, this is a new unit–not a refurb–and you don’t have to deal with any rebates.

Regular readers know I don’t really care for Netbooks, but $299 for an HP 2133 is mighty tempting. Show of hands: who’s pulling the trigger on this one?

Normally $499, the HP 2133 Netbook is now just $299.

The HP 2133 is the one Netbook I’ve actually reviewed, and I liked it well enough, except for two issues: price and performance. But my eval unit came with
Windows Vista and a $799 price tag; the model Amazon is selling has SUSE Linux and costs $299. By all accounts, Linux runs much faster on the 2133 than Vista, so it should be much more usable.

(Credit:
Amazon)