Obama Shifts Economic Team to Focus on a Recovery

LANDOVER, Md. ? President Obama on Friday completed the midterm makeover of his core economic team as it turned from crisis management to recovery measures, naming Gene B. Sperling as senior economic adviser in the White House.

As director of the Mr. Obama?s National Economic Council, Mr. Sperling returns to the same job he held under President Bill Clinton for four years, succeeding Lawrence H. Summers, who has returned to teach economics at Harvard University.

Mr. Sperling, who has been a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, is the latest Clinton-era veteran to take a prominent place in the West Wing, after Thursday?s announcement that William M. Daley, former commerce secretary under Mr. Clinton, is the new White House chief of staff.

?One of the reasons I?ve selected Gene is he?s done this before,? Mr. Obama said. During the Clinton administration, the president added, ?He helped formulate the policies that contributed to turning deficits to surpluses and a time of prosperity and progress for American families.?

Mr. Obama also named several other deputy economic advisers during an appearance at a manufacturing plant in Landover, Md., just east of the capital, at which he also hailed Friday?s government report of continued job growth in December. But with unemployment remaining high, he added, the administration is ?not letting up on our efforts? to create jobs.

The White House chose the plant site because the family-owned Thompson Creek Window Manufacturing credits its recent expansion to administration tax incentives for hiring and equipment purchases and to the increased sales of its windows, doors and siding by customers using tax incentives for buying energy-efficient home products.

Mr. Obama also promoted Jason Furman, who will remain as deputy director of the National Economic Council but with higher rank. Mr. Furman also worked under Mr. Sperling in the office during the Clinton administration. Neither Mr. Sperling nor Mr. Furman need Senate confirmation.

The president nominated Katharine G. Abraham as the third member of his Council of Economic Advisers, taking the seat previously held by Austan Goolsbee before Mr. Obama promoted him last year to the council?s chairmanship. And he named Heather Higginbottom, currently a White House domestic policy adviser, to become the deputy to the recently installed director at the Office of Management and Budget, Jacob J. Lew.

With the elevation of Mr. Sperling, Mr. Obama has replaced three of the four principals of his original economic team, who took office with him at the height of a recession and global financial crisis. Then he chose people for their experience in global economics and crisis management, including Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner, the only one of the original foursome who remains.

In Mr. Sperling and Mr. Lew, who as budget director also returned to the same job he had in the Clinton administration, Mr. Obama has two officials experienced in navigating Washington?s policy-making process through the executive and legislative branches, at a time when he must both put past policy achievements into effect and defend them against Congressional Republicans? attacks.

Mr. Sperling, as the director of the National Economic Council, is charged with coordinating economic and fiscal policy with the other advisers and Cabinet departments and brokering differences, a job for which he is regarded as better suited than the brilliant but sometimes abrasive Mr. Summers. Mr. Sperling is renowned even among Republicans as a workaholic with a knack for melding policy-making and effective political marketing of those policies, despite a reputation for disorganization.

Both he and Mr. Lew are liberals, but proven pragmatists. And both have records of negotiating bipartisan compromises of the sort Mr. Obama inevitably must seek now that he, like Mr. Clinton before him, confronts a Congress in which Republicans have won greater power.

Mr. Obama credited Mr. Sperling with helping to reach the tax cuts deal sealed with Republicans last month in Congress?s lame-duck session. Mr. Sperling, he said, helped devise a payroll tax cut and other tax incentives for low-wage and moderate-income workers now showing up in their paychecks.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a381c38e86472e60c8aa8e12c72f39ca

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Apple pulls VLC from the App Store

Months of speculation preceeded the action but today Apple officially pulled the popular media streaming app VLC from its App Store.

VLC for iPhone and iPad gained approval back in September, existing as a side project from the official desktop application by VideoLAN. After months of contention between the app developers, the creators of the desktop application and Apple, the app was removed at VideoLAN?s request because Apple?s App Store contravenes various parts of the GPL license under which it was released.

The official statement came from Rémi Denis-Courmont, posting on the Planet VideoLAN website:

At last, Apple has removed VLC media player from its application store. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved ? the hard way. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone, given the precedents.

There you have it. It?s quite evident the iPhone app was not supported by the VideoLAN community. When software uses a GPL license, any third-party revisions must adhere to them also. In the case of the iPhone app, you can see it did not. To reiterate, Apple had nothing to do with its removal (other than to physically pull it from the store), the beef was between the respective developers.

Were you a user of VLC on your iPad or iPhone? Have you found a decent alternative? Let us know in the comments.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/01/08/apple-officially-pulls-vlc-from-the-app-store/

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Give Me Back My Water Wings

Sprinting, shooting, jumping, punching. Name any human action verb, and you'll probably find it simulated reasonably well in a game somewhere. Unless, of course, it's swimming.

Despite all the water-levels inflicted on us, games have never quite managed swimming. In fact, Grand Theft Auto III famously featured a main character so downright terrified of the wet stuff that he?d curl up and die as soon as he got a splash on his little toe. I used to regularly bemoan the fact that I could lose all my best weapons merely by getting a dunking.

Thankfully, this is no longer common in these modern days of expansive gameplay, multimillion dollar budgets and huge areas to explore, but that doesn't mean matters have improved. Instead, we?re been handed some of the most dull swimming experiences we?ve ever had the misfortune to experience.

Take, for example, Grand Theft Auto IV. Nico?s an accomplished swimmer, and he?s happy to take a dip whenever he feels the urge. As such, when the temptation appears, usually at about the time his Wanted level hits the four-star mark, he?ll rush off to the nearest patch of water and paddle off into the middle of nowhere.

The police, being happy to stick to dry land unless you?ve committed mass-genocide, will soon give up and trot off back to their coffee and donuts. However, in all the excitement, Nico will by then have drifted out to sea. This means that you're now stuck with a good ten-minute button-prod-a-thon until you get back to dry land.


What's more, when you get there, unless it?s one of the handy, easy-to-grip areas, Nico isn?t going to play ball. Instead, you?re left slowly paddling along the coastline for a good 15 minutes, cursing your refusal to give yourself up to the cops. Woe betide you if you happen to be near the airport at this point; you might as well reload an old save game and rescue yourself from the sheer boredom of getting back to solid ground.

Swimming, it seems, simply isn?t fun. Nearly everyone?s gaming lives have been affected by the frustrating inclusion of water-based torment. Who hasn?t suffered a multitude of deaths in the guise of Lara Croft, as she twists and contorts in oxygen-free agony? Surely no-one can claim that Mario?s swimming levels even hit the heady heights of the poorest quality of those that take place on dry land?


The problem is that land offers freedom and quick manoeuvring; water doesn't, at least not to anything like the same degree. Ezio Auditore in Assassin?s Creed 2 may be able to hop from rooftop to rooftop like an agile moggy, but stick him in the water and he paddles along like an asthmatic donkey. It?s simply not fun going for a lengthy and tedious swim before you can find a bit of soil low enough to grab onto.

The solution? Unless you can make a swimming section somehow as action-packed as the rest of the game, make a dip in the ocean impossible. I?d much rather be annoyed by the inability to hop into the sea, than drop in and find I?ve got a 15-minute paddle to dry land ahead of me.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/3QKYz503lvU/

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iPhone Review: Rage

The easy, initial reaction to Rage for the iPhone is to say that id Software has done it again, delivering a game that sets a benchmark of graphical splendour for the platform and will doubtless grow to be one of the iPhone?s definitive shooters.

Closer inspection, however, reveals that early assessment to only be two thirds right. Yes, Rage is a technical marvel and it?s amazing that id Software has managed to cram such large, detailed levels into a mobile phone game. However, this isn?t a definitive shooter. If anything, Rage follows in the steps of Quake Wars and Doom 3; it's graphically magnificent, but a fundamentally boring game.

Rage is closer to a lightgun game than an actual first person shooter. Cast as contestants on Mutant Bash TV ? a gladiatorial TV show for the post-apocalypse civilisation ? players basically run a scripted gauntlet and kill all the baddies they see along the way. You can?t control your movement, and your role in the game is merely to aim and shoot using the three weapons provided.


Really, that?s all there is to Rage on the iPhone ? scripted hallways and enemies that pop up and down like cardboard cutouts. There are bonus targets to shoot along the way too, plus an active reload system that marketing execs would probably claim adds ?tactical depth?, but it?s all much of a muchness. Rage is essentially just Virtua Cop or House of the Dead with fancier graphics.

The fact that Rage is just a lightgun game, however, isn?t the problem. Instead, the issue is that it doesn?t feel like it was originally designed as one. Levels, for example, are so long and complex that, while they?d be great in a first person shooter, they become tiring when dropped into a lightgun game.

The levels take so long to complete, and are so lacking in variety, that they reduce players to yawns by the end of the first level. There are only a handful of different baddy-types, all with the same attacks. There are no bosses or sudden changes of pace to keep the game interesting, merely more rooms of mutants who stand perfectly still and throw easily-dodged bricks.

Despite the fact that the levels are so overly long, Rage still ends up feeling light on content too. There are only three levels to play at the moment, and all of them are very similar. The only replay value in any of them involves either finding all the hidden targets (which don?t unlock anything), or beating your high-score.

The result of all this is that Rage ultimately feels like little more than an expensive tech demo. The technology id has created is really the only grounds on which to recommend the game, unless you?re a big fan of monotonous, ceaseless, shallow and pointless shooting.

Verdict: Boring and badly designed, Rage?s only real appeal is its pretty looks. If that?s all you?re after then you'd be better off downloading Epic Citadel for free.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/qGZsYsU9mHs/

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SAP's Plan to Make Money by Cutting Carbon

Three years ago, software provider SAP was informed by one of its customers, a large European telecommunications company, that their business relationship would cease unless SAP produced a report detailing its energy use and greenhouse-gas footprint. A growing number of companies headquartered in Europe, as SAP is, were producing such documents along with their traditional annual reports. "It went from a nice-to-have to a must-have," says Rami Branitzky, the managing director of SAP Labs North America.

The company, which is based in Walldorf, Germany, not only created the report but also set an ambitious goal of cutting its global carbon emissions in half by 2020. In 2009 alone, it was able to cut emissions by 15 percent, saving 90 million euros (about $120 million). The emissions reduction?the equivalent of taking 50,000 cars off the road?was achieved in large part by changes in behavior at the $15 billion company, including cutbacks in air travel. SAP's internal savings, however, are just the beginning. The company calculates that its 105,000 customers in 120 countries collectively account for one-sixth of global carbon dioxide emissions. If those clients could be helped to make similar cuts, Branitzky says, the environmental benefits could be immense?and SAP could reap new business in the process, since it creates and sells analytical software that lets companies monitor their own carbon footprints and increase their energy efficiency. According to SAP's own estimates, the market for "sustainability software" will reach $7 billion within five years. "They've really taken the ball [on sustainability software] and are running with it faster and harder than any of the large players," says Warren Wilson, an energy and sustainability analyst at the London-based market research firm Ovum.


To highlight the reductions in its own carbon footprint, SAP recently showcased five efficiency initiatives at its campus in Palo Alto, California. The projects included installations of LED lights and solar panels. The company also overhauled its data center and has begun purchasing a fleet of electric vehicles and charging stations.

But the project with the fastest return on investment involved telepresence communication systems, which make it easier for meetings to happen virtually rather than requiring air travel. SAP installed three videoconferencing systems from Cisco Systems that use high-end visual and audio equipment to create the sense of being in the same room as others who may be half a world away. Each system cost $300,000, but SAP says they paid for themselves in one year by reducing the need for business trips. "Our biggest footprint that we generate by far is airplanes, as many people commute back and forth to Germany," says Branitzky. "I think we knew it inherently, but only when we started measuring it did we see the impact and do something about it."

SAP sought to get more efficiency out of the data center by spending $128,000 on a retrofit that cut the facility's energy requirements by 15 to 20 percent and should pay for itself in five years. The company installed a rectifier, a device that converts all electricity coming into the data center from AC power to DC. Electricity is typically converted from AC to DC at each server using small, inefficient rectifiers that give off a significant amount of waste heat. Doing the conversion in one central device increases the efficiency of the process and reduces the amount of heat generated in the server racks.

Of all the initiatives, this is the most significant, according to Michael LoCascio, an analyst at Lux Research. But he suggests that SAP could even go further in this regard. "I find it amazing that there is no focus on their data center's cooling systems," he says. "You get more bang for your buck, but it isn't sexy." Branitzky says the company is just getting started on its data center efficiency efforts and has already begun improving the cooling systems at similar facilities in Germany.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=51b0d3b094758e6622fc70f7cf63fdf5

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iPhone Review: Rage

The easy, initial reaction to Rage for the iPhone is to say that id Software has done it again, delivering a game that sets a benchmark of graphical splendour for the platform and will doubtless grow to be one of the iPhone?s definitive shooters.

Closer inspection, however, reveals that early assessment to only be two thirds right. Yes, Rage is a technical marvel and it?s amazing that id Software has managed to cram such large, detailed levels into a mobile phone game. However, this isn?t a definitive shooter. If anything, Rage follows in the steps of Quake Wars and Doom 3; it's graphically magnificent, but a fundamentally boring game.

Rage is closer to a lightgun game than an actual first person shooter. Cast as contestants on Mutant Bash TV ? a gladiatorial TV show for the post-apocalypse civilisation ? players basically run a scripted gauntlet and kill all the baddies they see along the way. You can?t control your movement, and your role in the game is merely to aim and shoot using the three weapons provided.


Really, that?s all there is to Rage on the iPhone ? scripted hallways and enemies that pop up and down like cardboard cutouts. There are bonus targets to shoot along the way too, plus an active reload system that marketing execs would probably claim adds ?tactical depth?, but it?s all much of a muchness. Rage is essentially just Virtua Cop or House of the Dead with fancier graphics.

The fact that Rage is just a lightgun game, however, isn?t the problem. Instead, the issue is that it doesn?t feel like it was originally designed as one. Levels, for example, are so long and complex that, while they?d be great in a first person shooter, they become tiring when dropped into a lightgun game.

The levels take so long to complete, and are so lacking in variety, that they reduce players to yawns by the end of the first level. There are only a handful of different baddy-types, all with the same attacks. There are no bosses or sudden changes of pace to keep the game interesting, merely more rooms of mutants who stand perfectly still and throw easily-dodged bricks.

Despite the fact that the levels are so overly long, Rage still ends up feeling light on content too. There are only three levels to play at the moment, and all of them are very similar. The only replay value in any of them involves either finding all the hidden targets (which don?t unlock anything), or beating your high-score.

The result of all this is that Rage ultimately feels like little more than an expensive tech demo. The technology id has created is really the only grounds on which to recommend the game, unless you?re a big fan of monotonous, ceaseless, shallow and pointless shooting.

Verdict: Boring and badly designed, Rage?s only real appeal is its pretty looks. If that?s all you?re after then you'd be better off downloading Epic Citadel for free.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/qGZsYsU9mHs/

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CES 2011: Love to run? Check out Nike Plus? new GPS powered watch.

CES 2011: Love to run? Check out Nike Plus? new GPS powered watch.

Last night at the Popular Mechanics CES Editor?s Choice awards, Nike took home a trophy for its new Sportwatch with TomTom?s GPS technology. ?This is a gadget for people who are competitive runners and truly data obsessed,? said Jim Meigs, PM?s Editor-in-Chief.

Nike?s ?running technology? has come a long way since their iPod savvy sneakers featured embedded pedometer-like accelerometers in 2006. Thanks to a partnership with GPS technology company TomTom, Nike?s new Sportwatch includes built-in GPS and a USB port so you can download all of your running information with a simple plug-in. The screen features a backlit LED screen with large, easy-to-read numbers.

So now you can wear whatever shoes you want! Doh! The watch debuts April 1 and will cost from $199 to $299.

About the Author

Courtney Boyd Myers is the East Coast editor of TNW, based in NYC. She began her career writing about robots @ Forbes and has also written for PCMag, PSFK, IEEE Spectrum, the Huffington Post + Pocket-Lint. She loves magnets + reading on her Kindle. You can follow her on Twitter or e-mail her at Courtney@TheNextWeb.com.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2011/01/08/ces-2011-love-to-run-check-out-nike-plus-new-gps-powered-watch/

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