Despite Plan to Enter Rehab, Weiner Still Faces Calls to Resign

Pressed on whether Mr. Weiner, a Democrat, had plans to return to work in the House once he had completed his treatment, his spokeswoman, Risa B. Heller, declined to comment beyond a statement released on Saturday saying he needed time to determine what he would do next.

Whatever Mr. Weiner?s plans are, the 24 hours since his spokeswoman said that he was requesting a short leave of absence from the House to seek treatment did little to mollify the frustration and anger of House Democratic leaders over the lewd messages and photos he admitted sending to women he met online. In fact, top Democrats in the House intensified pressure on Mr. Weiner to give up his Congressional seat on Sunday, after new embarrassing photographs surfaced showing the congressman covered only with a towel.

Appearing on ?Meet the Press? on NBC, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, suggested that resignation was a far preferable option to a House ethics investigation and possible charges. ?All his colleagues agree that this process ? a judicial process through the Ethics Committee ? is going to take time,? Mr. Hoyer said. ?I really don?t know that we have that time, and I would hope that Mr. Weiner would use this opportunity to reflect upon whether or not he can effectively proceed. I don?t see how he can, and I hope he would make that judgment.?

On Saturday, the most senior Democrats in the House, including Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, called on Mr. Weiner to resign after trying to convince him privately that he was harming himself, his family and the party by staying in office.

But rather than resigning, Mr. Weiner announced on Saturday that he would take a leave of absence from the House to get treatment. It is not known where he is being treated or what the nature of that treatment is.

His aides would say only that his Congressional office would remain open with staff members on hand to respond to constituents.

While Democrats in Washington stepped up the pressure on Mr. Weiner, two prominent New York Democrats, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Senator Charles E. Schumer, declined to call for his resignation during appearances at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan on Sunday.

Asked if it would be best for his party if Mr. Weiner were to resign, Mr. Cuomo said it was not his place to make that determination. ?It?s basically a federal matter, so I don?t know that my involvement would be helpful or relevant,? he said. ?Whether or not he should resign, that?s up to him, his constituents and the Democratic leadership.?

Later, Mr. Schumer, who is Mr. Weiner?s political mentor, declined to comment beyond saying, ?Those of us who have been longtime friends of Anthony are heartbroken, and I?m just going to try to enjoy the parade today.?

In the meantime, protesters gathered outside Mr. Weiner?s Kew Gardens office on Queens Boulevard on Sunday, calling on him to resign, waving handmade placards that read, ?Resign Now Weiner,? and chanting, ?Resign today! Rehab tomorrow!?

?I don?t want my congressman sending pictures of his genitals,? said one protester, Kevin Hilton, a 47-year-old resident of Marine Park, Brooklyn. ?It?s disgusting.?

The protesters were met with a smattering of voices that supported Mr. Weiner; one young man yelled, ?Keep your seat,? as he walked by, and another man held a sign that read, ?Weiner should not quit.?

On Sunday, the Web site TMZ published photographs that were said to have been taken in the House gym showing Mr. Weiner with his hand on his crotch and a towel covering his waist. The Web site said the photos were sent to a woman.

Despite the call by Democrats for Mr. Weiner?s resignation, Republicans sought to keep Democrats on the defensive. On ?Meet the Press,? the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, accused Democrats of acting too slowly in dealing with Mr. Weiner.

Mr. Priebus said ?the only job Nancy Pelosi was interested in saving was Anthony Weiner?s? during the initial days of the scandal. ?We?ve got leadership and a Democratic Party that are defending a guy that deserves no defense,? he added.

Thomas Kaplan and Mick Meenan contributed reporting from New York.

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Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Review

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, in its current form, was born out of a response to Apple's sleek and thin iPad 2 tablet. The original Galaxy Tab 10.1, which hadn't reached market yet, just couldn't compete, so Samsung went back the drawing board and turned out this beauty of a tablet in record time. And this one can compete.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 features a large, wide-screen display that looks sharp and bright, and it rests inside a body that is incredibly thin and light. This 10-inch tablet weighs less than a number of smaller tablets on the market, yet it still packs a dual-core 1GHz processor and the latest version of Android 3.1 Honeycomb.

There still aren't very many tablet-specific Android apps, and those that exist are not that easy to find in the Android Market, but the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is still a desirable piece of kit.


Hardware

As is the case with all 10-inch tablets, Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 is a large device. Its face measures 256.6mm x 172.9mm (10.1in x 6.8in), but the entire tablet is only 8.6mm (.3in) thick. Pair that with a low 565g (19.9oz) weight and you have a device that is much easier to wield than one might expect.

On top of that, the Tab's build quality is really good. The glossy back, which is white and silver on our unit, feels good on the finger tips, and all of the parts fit tightly together. The Tab also feels very strong in spite of its low profile design.

There are no buttons to be found on the front of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, only the 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display and the forward-facing 2 megapixel camera. When held horizontally, the volume and power controls are found on the left end of the top edge of the tablet, while the 3.5mm headphone jack is a bit over to the right. A stereo speaker port can be found on the left and right edges, one each, and the proprietary charging/data port can be found on the bottom edge.

Samsung installed a 3 megapixel camera with both autofocus and flash on the rear of the Tab 10.1. Apart from the Samsung logo in the middle of the rear cover, though, nothing else of note can be seen on the tablet's exterior.

The interior is home to an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz processor and 16GB (or 32GB) of internal storage. I was testing the Wi-Fi only model, but 3G-capable models are expected soon.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/review/410-samsung-galaxy-tab-10/

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Spotify signs US deal with Universal, one more label to go

Spotify has signed a distribution deal with Universal Music Group, the world?s largest music label, according to All Things Digital. Unsurprisingly, both Spotify and Universal have declined to comment. The streaming company doesn't need all four labels to launch in the US, though it would certainly help, but because it now has three out of the four, Spotify will likely soon launch in the US.

The popular European music streaming service was originally planning to launch in the US by the end of 2010. As we know, that didn't happen. Last month, a rumor started up that Facebook would be partnering with Spotify, though no money is being exchanged. Last time we heard, Spotify still didn't have a US launch date to announce other than "this year." The service recently passed the 1 million subscriber mark, making it the biggest paid music service in the world.

Four months ago, Spotify reportedly struck a deal with EMI Music and five months ago, the company signed a deal with Sony Music Entertainment. Spotify thus has three of the four major music labels; the other one left is Warner Music Group.

US labels have hesitated to support Spotify's model as they don't believe it can be profitable. Spotify saw a huge financial loss in 2009. The music-streaming company enjoyed revenues of £11.32 million, but endured distribution costs of £608,711, cost of sales equal to £18.82 million, and administrative expenses of £8.29 million. The result was an operating loss of £16.40 million, and a net loss of £16.66 million after taxation.

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A Preview of Future Disk Drives

A new type of data storage technology, called phase-change memory, has proven capable of writing some types of data faster than conventional flash based storage. The tests used a hard drive based on prototype phase-change memory chips.

Disks based on solid-state, flash memory chips are increasingly used in computers and servers because they perform faster than conventional magnetic hard drives. The performance of the experimental phase-change disk drive, created by researchers at University of California San Diego, suggests that it won't be long before that technology is able to give computing devices another speed boost.

The prototype created by the researchers is the first to publically benchmark the performance of a phase-change memory chips working in a disk drive. Several semiconductor companies are working on phase-change chips, but they have not released information about storage devices built with them.

"Phase-change chips are not quite ready for prime time, but if the technology continues to develop, this is what [solid state drives] will look like in the next few years," says Steve Swanson, who built the prototype, known as Onyx, with colleagues. It had a data capacity of eight gigabytes and went head-to-head with what Swanson calls a "high-end" 80 GB flash drive made for use in servers.

When it came to writing small chunks of data on the order of kilobytes in size, Onyx was between 70 percent and 120 percent faster than the commercial drive. At the same time, the prototype placed significantly less computational load on the processor of the computer using it. It was also much faster at reading data than the flash drive when accessing blocks of data of any size. The kind of large volume, small read and write patterns that Onyx excelled at are a hallmark of the type of calculations involved in analyzing social networks like those of Twitter, says Swanson. However, Onyx was much slower at writing larger chunks of data than its commercially established competitor.

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Obama Seeks to Win Back Wall St. Cash

The guests were asked for their thoughts on how to speed the economic recovery, then the president opened the floor for over an hour on hot issues like hedge fund regulation and the deficit.

Mr. Obama, who enraged many financial industry executives a year and a half ago by labeling them ?fat cats? and criticizing their bonuses, followed up the meeting with phone calls to those who could not attend.

The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash ? in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.

Last month, Mr. Obama?s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama?s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.

?The first goal was to get recognition that the administration has led the economy from an unimaginably difficult place to where we are today,? said Blair W. Effron, an investment banker closely involved in Mr. Obama?s fund-raising efforts. ?Now the second goal is to turn that into support.?

The president?s top financial industry supporters say they are confident that the support Mr. Obama needs will ultimately be there, despite the financial industry?s unhappiness over his efforts to tighten regulation of their businesses. But it is clear that those supporters will have to work much harder to win over the financial services industry than they did in 2008, before Wall Street?s bust, the subsequent clashes over policy and the sometimes bitter personal differences that lingered afterward.

Executives at large investment banks, a group that gave generously to Mr. Obama in his last campaign, are remaining on the sidelines for now. Only a small handful of such donors have appeared in Mr. Obama?s joint campaign filings with the Democratic National Committee, though officials there said more would appear in the coming weeks.

Some traditional heavy hitters in Democratic Wall Street fund-raising have stepped out of the game. They include Maureen White and her husband, Steven L. Rattner, a founder of the Quadrangle Group, whose Fifth Avenue living room was a critical conduit between Wall Street and Democratic candidates in the years before Mr. Rattner joined the Obama administration to help restructure the auto industry. The couple did not resume their old role after Mr. Rattner left government, and he was caught up last year in an investigation into kickbacks to New York?s state pension fund.

And even as some criticize the president for listening too closely, they say, to Wall Street on issues like the 2008 bailout and financial regulation, he has suffered some unusually public defections and criticism by some former Wall Street supporters, who view his policies and rhetoric as unfair to their industry. Many are Republicans whose support last time around burnished his image as a post-partisan problem solver.

And as Mr. Obama seeks to rebuild, Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is using his background as a venture capital executive and his policy proposals to woo financial-industry donors.

Last week, Mr. Romney held three fund-raisers in Greenwich, Conn., and New York, including a reception hosted by Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund manager who donated to Mr. Obama in 2008. Mr. Scaramucci said he wanted a president who embodied pragmatism and middle-of-the-road solutions. In 2008, that candidate was Mr. Obama, he said; today, it is Mr. Romney.

?He seemed like he was going to be a transformative candidate,? Mr. Scaramucci said of Mr. Obama in an interview. ?I?m really not an ideological guy, and I think the country right now needs more practical, less partisan people.?

To offset those defections, Mr. Obama?s campaign has deployed a corps of loyal Wall Street supporters who have fanned out to defend the president?s record and stoke fatigued donors. They include Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; the hedge fund managers Orin S. Kramer and Eric Mindich; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.

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Intel's 'Ultrabook' Strategy is Outdated

Intel's 'Ultrabook' Strategy is Outdated

Posted on 8th Jun 2011 at 07:28 by Clive Webster with 70 comments

While it?s good news for customers that Intel is aiming to make superportable laptops that rival the MacBook Air affordable for many, via its ?ultrabook? project, it shows a slightly outdated mode of thinking. When asked what would make superportable laptops successful, Intel?s executive vice-president Sean Maloney replied that a low price would do it. Low price = more sales = more profit, the conventional wisdom goes. Or does it?

The problem with the equation above is that low price = low margin, and you therefore rely on huge sales to make significant profits. And the drive to lower prices can lead to design compromises ? plastic rather than aluminium shells, steel rather than magnesium alloy skeletons, cheap components that fail more quickly or are louder or slower. This is the PC industry for the last 30 years.

But it?s a flawed business model ? just look at UK box-shifter Mesh, which ceased trading recently. Equally, look at Acer. For years it has been trimming its costs to be ultra-efficient while also climbing the league tables in terms of units sold. All this effort was in many ways the pinnacle of the low-price philosophy of making money from computers. And it failed: Apple is more profitable.

That?s the shift that we?re seeing: so far, we?ve made do with stuff that kind of works, does a job and doesn?t cost too much. Now we want technology that?s cool, that looks like it could be from the future and that we?re not embarrassed to leave out on the coffee table. Make something desirable and it will sell, even if you whack on a decent margin. And from that decent margin you can invest in customer support (how many negative stories have you heard about Apple customer support? How many positive ones?) and into the creation of new, even more desirable kit.

Of course, the Apple success story doesn?t end at merely charging extra for desirability, there?s the fact that it takes a 30 per cent skim of any software sold for that desirable item. However, the point that it?s desirability and not cheapness that really makes money these days doesn?t crumble in light of the App Store levy caveat. Hopefully superportable laptop makers won?t forget this fact, despite Intel?s out-of-date thinking about them; certainly if preview shots from Computex 2011 are anything to go by, Asus hasn?t with its UX21. Could we see desirably light laptops without a prohibitive price? Possibly, but I?m hoping that the latter doesn?t undermine the former.

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Minecraft delayed, also coming to Xbox 360

The immensely popular PC sandbox game Minecraft was supposed to leave beta status on November 11, 2011 but that date has been pushed back. Mojang Studios is changing the release date because the game's creator, Markus Persson, also known as Notch, wants to find a good venue for MinecraftCon and the date 11/11/11 is fully booked.

The release date was supposed to coincide with several other games and movies, and Notch gave it the unofficial tagline "us too." Now he's being forced to change the date, speculating that it could be a week later. More details will follow as soon as a venue has been booked. When it finally ships, Minecraft will be available for ?20.00 ($28.87); right now it's still in beta and goes for ?14.95 ($21.58).

Notch also confirmed that Minecraft is coming to the Xbox 360 this winter. The new version of the game, which doesn't have a name yet, will be designed specifically for console play. It will feature (but not require) Kinect support, and will be an exclusive Xbox 360 title.

The Xbox 360 version will join Minecraft - Pocket Edition, an Android port. The game will be arriving on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play first, before it shows up for other Android devices. The Xperia Play was likely chosen because it has dedicated gaming buttons. The price of the app is still unknown, nor do we have a release date or specific exclusivity period for the Xperia Play, but we do know there is already working code, courtesy of the video released last month.

"On both these platforms, I?m going to be more secretive about giving out details," Persson said in a statement. "This is because there are actual PR budgets on them, and I don?t want to mess up any big plans. I will be the game designer on both new Minecraft titles, but I won?t be involved in the programming as I'm focused on the PC version of Minecraft."

Mojang Studios is currently working on Minecraft Beta 1.7, which Notch refers to as the "adventure update." Details are being kept secret so users can enjoy a few surprises, though it is known that exploration and combat will become more rewarding. Modding support is also coming on a small scale with version 1.7. The source code will be given out to a very small group of people before the release of version 1.7, followed by the modding API.

Minecraft was originally released (now referred to as the classic version) on May 17, 2009. It entered Indev status on December 23, 2009, Infdev status on February 27, 2010, alpha status on June 28, 2010, and finally beta status on December 20, 2010. When Minecraft leaves beta status on November 11, 2011, it will be available for ?20.00 (about $29.00); right now the beta goes for ?14.95 (about $22.00). Release dates for Android and iOS versions are to be announced this year.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44211-minecraft-delayed-also-coming-to-xbox-360.html

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Minecraft delayed, also coming to Xbox 360

The immensely popular PC sandbox game Minecraft was supposed to leave beta status on November 11, 2011 but that date has been pushed back. Mojang Studios is changing the release date because the game's creator, Markus Persson, also known as Notch, wants to find a good venue for MinecraftCon and the date 11/11/11 is fully booked.

The release date was supposed to coincide with several other games and movies, and Notch gave it the unofficial tagline "us too." Now he's being forced to change the date, speculating that it could be a week later. More details will follow as soon as a venue has been booked. When it finally ships, Minecraft will be available for ?20.00 ($28.87); right now it's still in beta and goes for ?14.95 ($21.58).

Notch also confirmed that Minecraft is coming to the Xbox 360 this winter. The new version of the game, which doesn't have a name yet, will be designed specifically for console play. It will feature (but not require) Kinect support, and will be an exclusive Xbox 360 title.

The Xbox 360 version will join Minecraft - Pocket Edition, an Android port. The game will be arriving on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play first, before it shows up for other Android devices. The Xperia Play was likely chosen because it has dedicated gaming buttons. The price of the app is still unknown, nor do we have a release date or specific exclusivity period for the Xperia Play, but we do know there is already working code, courtesy of the video released last month.

"On both these platforms, I?m going to be more secretive about giving out details," Persson said in a statement. "This is because there are actual PR budgets on them, and I don?t want to mess up any big plans. I will be the game designer on both new Minecraft titles, but I won?t be involved in the programming as I'm focused on the PC version of Minecraft."

Mojang Studios is currently working on Minecraft Beta 1.7, which Notch refers to as the "adventure update." Details are being kept secret so users can enjoy a few surprises, though it is known that exploration and combat will become more rewarding. Modding support is also coming on a small scale with version 1.7. The source code will be given out to a very small group of people before the release of version 1.7, followed by the modding API.

Minecraft was originally released (now referred to as the classic version) on May 17, 2009. It entered Indev status on December 23, 2009, Infdev status on February 27, 2010, alpha status on June 28, 2010, and finally beta status on December 20, 2010. When Minecraft leaves beta status on November 11, 2011, it will be available for ?20.00 (about $29.00); right now the beta goes for ?14.95 (about $22.00). Release dates for Android and iOS versions are to be announced this year.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44211-minecraft-delayed-also-coming-to-xbox-360.html

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Blog - How Robots Will Beat Humans at Billiards

Once a year, at the International Computer Olympiad, teams pit their AI software against others' in a variety of nerd-appropriate sports: chess, go, backgammon, etc. Since 2005, however, the ICO has also included computer simulations of billiards.

Pool is a hard game for computers to play because it's not just about sinking balls -- it's also about setting up the table to your opponent's disadvantage. Throw in opportunities to sink more than one ball at a time and the literally infinite number of shots that can be taken in every turn, and you've got a gigantic parameter space for a computer to chew on.

And that's before you get to the problem of translating the computer simulations of pool to the real world. Right now there are a handful of robots capable of playing the game, most notably Deep Green of Queen's University, which is an industrial robot.

Warning, the following video has unnecessarily loud, pounding music:

But back to the world of virtual pool: in this realm, advances are being made all the time, in hopes of creating a pool AI so powerful that it can some day be paired with a physics simulator and robot capable of beating the world's best human players.

The latest development, while modest, allows a pool-playing AI to better optimize its shots for both pocketing extra balls and breaking clusters of them. Researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke, in Quebec, are tuning their AI's decision-making model to take multiple factors into account when planning its shots, since pool is about strategy as much as skill.

Part of the value of attacking this problem is that it's so distinct from other models problems in computer science and artificial intelligence, such as Chess. In Chess, all the options available to a player are discrete -- there are only so many pieces that can be moved, in a prescribed number of ways, at any given moment.

Pool, on the other hand "features a unique combination of properties that distinguish it from others such games, including continuous action and state spaces, uncertainty in execution, a unique turn-taking structure, and of course an adversarial nature." That's a quote from Computational Pool: A new challenge for game theory pragmatics (pdf), which announces the next tournament for virtual pool, to be held in August 2011.

Interestingly, this competition will attempt to simulate what it would be like for these virtual pool players to have their models translated into real-world pool by robots: "The championships will feature separate competitions at different noise levels, allowing for innovation and new ideas, since new strategies may be most effective at the new noise levels."

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Blog - How Robots Will Beat Humans at Billiards

Once a year, at the International Computer Olympiad, teams pit their AI software against others' in a variety of nerd-appropriate sports: chess, go, backgammon, etc. Since 2005, however, the ICO has also included computer simulations of billiards.

Pool is a hard game for computers to play because it's not just about sinking balls -- it's also about setting up the table to your opponent's disadvantage. Throw in opportunities to sink more than one ball at a time and the literally infinite number of shots that can be taken in every turn, and you've got a gigantic parameter space for a computer to chew on.

And that's before you get to the problem of translating the computer simulations of pool to the real world. Right now there are a handful of robots capable of playing the game, most notably Deep Green of Queen's University, which is an industrial robot.

Warning, the following video has unnecessarily loud, pounding music:

But back to the world of virtual pool: in this realm, advances are being made all the time, in hopes of creating a pool AI so powerful that it can some day be paired with a physics simulator and robot capable of beating the world's best human players.

The latest development, while modest, allows a pool-playing AI to better optimize its shots for both pocketing extra balls and breaking clusters of them. Researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke, in Quebec, are tuning their AI's decision-making model to take multiple factors into account when planning its shots, since pool is about strategy as much as skill.

Part of the value of attacking this problem is that it's so distinct from other models problems in computer science and artificial intelligence, such as Chess. In Chess, all the options available to a player are discrete -- there are only so many pieces that can be moved, in a prescribed number of ways, at any given moment.

Pool, on the other hand "features a unique combination of properties that distinguish it from others such games, including continuous action and state spaces, uncertainty in execution, a unique turn-taking structure, and of course an adversarial nature." That's a quote from Computational Pool: A new challenge for game theory pragmatics (pdf), which announces the next tournament for virtual pool, to be held in August 2011.

Interestingly, this competition will attempt to simulate what it would be like for these virtual pool players to have their models translated into real-world pool by robots: "The championships will feature separate competitions at different noise levels, allowing for innovation and new ideas, since new strategies may be most effective at the new noise levels."

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