Samsung to sell luxury Galaxy Tab for $1,000

Samsung is planning to unveil a luxury Galaxy Tab model that comes with a leather case and Bluetooth headset, and will set you back 749 or about $1,000. First shown off at Millionaire Fair, a European expo that shows off expensive toys and gadgets, the luxury version will reportedly be a limited time offer that lasts through January, according to TG Daily.

Apart from two aforementioned features, the luxury version will be the same as other Galaxy Tab devices sold by several major US carriers. The Galaxy Tab typically costs $650 without a service plan or about $400 with a two-year plan from some carriers.

A luxury version of the Galaxy Tab suggests that Samsung wants to raise its brand awareness amongst those with a little more spending money. Samsung sold 600,000 units of the Galaxy Tab in a month and then broke the 1 million mark before two months passed.

Running on Android 2.2, the Galaxy Tab features a TFT-LCD capacitive touch screen with a 1024x600 resolution, a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird Application processor, 512MB of RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, 3G, and dual cameras for capturing still images, videos, or making video calls. It also has a robust HTML Web browsing experience with Adobe Flash 10.1, as well as support for a number of different formats, including DivX, Xvid, WMV, and MPEG-4.

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Leaving Facebook

Last week, I joined Diaspora.

Not the Diaspora?I didn't convert to Judaism or emigrate anywhere. Instead, I accepted a coveted (by geeks) invitation to sign up for Diaspora, a decentralized, privacy-focused social network created by four New York University undergrads in response to what has been seen as Facebook's focus on profits at the expense of users' privacy.

The foursome officially announced the project on April 24; they released an open-source developer version of the code in mid-September, and invitations to the website's private alpha (the first phase of testing) began going out on November 23. Though Diaspora is a little buggy, a little underpopulated (I have two contacts, compared with hundreds on other sites), and a little Spartan in the way of features, it is already different in interesting ways from the sites that came before.

Facebook is like a casino: garish, crowded, distracting, designed to lure you in and keep you there far longer than you ever intended. (The same is true of its predecessor, MySpace.) Status updates?not only by actual friends and acquaintances but also from companies, news outlets, celebrities, sports teams?jockey for space with videos, ads, games, chat windows, event calendars, and come-ons to find more people, make more connections, share more data.

Diaspora is more like the calm, minimal workspace of a Zen devotee. Unlike Facebook and its competitors, Diaspora makes it easy to separate your social spheres. Your home page displays your status updates and those of your online friends, along with lists of your contacts and the categories, called "aspects," into which you've sorted them. The default aspects are work and family, but adding new aspects is as easy as opening a new tab in a Web browser. You can craft a status update to share across all aspects, with only one, or with a few, and it's very clear on every page which information has gone out to which groups.

This simplicity and clarity have been key design objectives for the Diaspora team from the start. In a blog update posted during development over the summer, they remarked on "spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies." The investment shows, and it's a huge contrast to the complicated and hidden privacy controls in Facebook.

Another difference is the ease of sharing?or not?your Diaspora content with Facebook and Twitter. Rather than making such connections difficult to find and use, the site makes it easy to connect to other services, and it offers the option of sharing any public upload via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS, simply by clicking a box. In the long run, says cofounder Maxwell Salzberg, Diaspora should be service-agnostic and able to import and export data from any Web service, in nearly any format. The goal isn't to replace Facebook or any other service as a way to interact online but to eliminate the need to store private data on multiple websites, many of which seem geared to an all-or-nothing sharing of personal information.

The "like" button is nowhere to be seen on Diaspora. You comment on a post, or don't. I'm curious to see how this will affect my online interactions. I confess that I am frequently guilty of "liking" friends' Facebook updates; it's much easier than taking the time to comment and interact with someone on even Facebook's typically perfunctory level. Diaspora is also less intrusive: rather than sending you an e-mail by default every time someone comments on your status or on a friend's status that you've commented on, you see content only when you log in. This does make it easier to lose track of online "conversations"?but wow, what a relief to my always-overcrowded inbox.

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Samsung to sell luxury Galaxy Tab for $1,000

Samsung is planning to unveil a luxury Galaxy Tab model that comes with a leather case and Bluetooth headset, and will set you back 749 or about $1,000. First shown off at Millionaire Fair, a European expo that shows off expensive toys and gadgets, the luxury version will reportedly be a limited time offer that lasts through January, according to TG Daily.

Apart from two aforementioned features, the luxury version will be the same as other Galaxy Tab devices sold by several major US carriers. The Galaxy Tab typically costs $650 without a service plan or about $400 with a two-year plan from some carriers.

A luxury version of the Galaxy Tab suggests that Samsung wants to raise its brand awareness amongst those with a little more spending money. Samsung sold 600,000 units of the Galaxy Tab in a month and then broke the 1 million mark before two months passed.

Running on Android 2.2, the Galaxy Tab features a TFT-LCD capacitive touch screen with a 1024x600 resolution, a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird Application processor, 512MB of RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, 3G, and dual cameras for capturing still images, videos, or making video calls. It also has a robust HTML Web browsing experience with Adobe Flash 10.1, as well as support for a number of different formats, including DivX, Xvid, WMV, and MPEG-4.

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Seagate announces first 1TB 2.5-inch enterprise hard drive

We've already seen the industry's first 2.5-inch 1TB consumer hard drive courtesy of Western Digital, but Seagate has announced what it claims to be the first enterprise-grade solution. The company today introduced its 1TB 2.5-inch Constellation.2 drive, which is designed for server applications in environments that range from small and medium businesses to large enterprise data centers.

The Constellation.2 ships in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities with interface options including 6Gb/s SATA or SAS. The 250GB version is SATA only, and it's worth noting that the Constellation.2 is only rated for a maximum sustained transfer rate of 115MB/s, so it won't utilize the extra headroom a 6Gb/s interface provides anyway. Other features include a 64MB cache and a 7200RPM rotation speed.


Power levels vary between configurations. Drives with SAS consume 3.85W at idle and 6.4W under load. That's cut by half a watt when using SATA, and Seagate's "PowerChoice" feature supposedly cuts idle draw by over 50%. All models are accompanied by a five-year warranty and have a MTBF of 1.4 million hours, which has been increased from the 1.2 million hour rating of the Constellation.1.

Segate hasn't mentioned pricing, but it did say that Dell would be offering the Constellation.2 in its machines by late December. Being made for servers and all, we should note that the drives pack four 250GB platters and measure 14.8mm thick, which means they probably won't fit in your mobile computer. Notebook drives are typically 9.5mm tall or 12.5mm for high capacity three-platter models.

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PC Hardware Buyer's Guide, December 2010

PC Hardware Buyer's Guide, December 2010

Posted on 3rd Dec 2010 at 11:56 by Paul Goodhead with 28 comments

As most of our long-term readers will know, we produce a PC hardware buyer?s guide each month, detailing our views on what PC components you should be buying and why. It?s a great opportunity for us to summarise our findings of the last month and for you guys to tell us that we're wrong.

This month though there are simply so many new releases just out of reach over the upgrade hill that we simply didn't think it was worth doing December buyers guide.

Intel's imminent release of its much hyped Sandy Bridge CPUs, for example, means we can't confidently recommend anyone build an LGA1156-based system from scratch. Even our recommended LGA1366 systems, such as our Premium Player, may even be under threat if Sandy Bridge's performance matches up to the buzz being generated.

PC Hardware Buyer's Guide, December 2010

Add to this the fact that it looks like there's a slew of new graphics card releases from both sides of the red/green divide on the horizon, and the waters become even more muddied.

ATI for instance is about to release its Radeon HD 6900-series, which should logically compete directly with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 5801.5GB. We also expect new graphics cards from Nvidia sometime soon, as it would be silly not to deploy its revised Fermi chip in more GPUs than just the GTX 580.

As a result, we won?t be publishing a buyer?s guide this month and will instead be dispensing the tried and tested tech world cliché of ?just wait another month? before taking the plunge. There is so much new and exciting kit in the horizon that it would be pointless to recommend you buy anything now, unless you absolutely have to.

We?ll be back on track with our buyers guide in January of course, so you should expect a bumper article detailing how we think you should be spending you Christmas windfall.

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Predictive Modeling Isn't Magic

Paolo Gaudiano is a mathematician and cognitive scientist who is often asked to demystify the practice of predictive modeling for businesses. A former professor at Boston University, he left academia to become chief scientist at Artificial Life, a startup focused on evolutionary algorithms, before joining Icosystem as its president. Founded in 2001, the company has built predictive modeling systems for clients as diverse as French phone company Orange, pharma giant Eli Lilly, and casino operator Harrah's. The firm, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has also done work for the U.S. military, most recently building simulation software to model the infrastructure efforts in Afganistan.

TR: To some people, predictive modeling sounds like magic, because it promises to tell you what will happen in the future.

Guadiano: No, it's not magic at all. It's a way of taking advantage of computers to replicate the real world. But you don't just want to replicate what happened?you want to see what will happen if the world changes around you. What if the economy collapses? What if I change my sales strategy?

You can take factors into account that are otherwise incredibly difficult to take into account. So we're not predicting the future but just giving you a better understanding of how things work and a slightly better likelihood that the things you do will actually turn out the way you expect them to. It's a decision support tool. It makes your intuition more quantitative. It gives you a way to test the validity of your intuition with data and come up with a better answer. That's all it is.

Your workhorse technology at Icosystem is "agent-based modeling." What is agent-based modeling, where did the technology come from, and how do you implement it?

Agent-based modeling started a long time ago as a tool in the social sciences, for understanding the behaviors of populations. It's come of age in the past ten years. The core idea is whenever you have a complex organization or ecosystem, it's easier to understand and simulate the behavior of individuals and how they interact with one another and their environment than it is to come up with some kind of a mathematical law that tells you how the population behaves.

What are the "agents" in these simulations?

Agents are replicas of whatever elements of the system we're studying. Typically, they're humans, so if we're solving a marketing problem, they're consumers. But they can also be personnel in a company, cars on a highway, or computers on a network.

You simulate things from the bottom up. You quite literally capture the details of how these elements work and how they connect with one another. That turns out to be a very powerful way to predict how the system as a whole will behave. I can run on a laptop a simulation of 100,000 consumers doing their shopping and looking at advertising, and it will take two minutes to run it. By looking at the results, it gives you a different way of thinking about your problem.

What do you mean by a different way of thinking?

For example, we're doing a project for the Navy, helping them understand reconstruction in territories like Afghanistan and how you combine that with strategic communications. So we built a model that looks at Afghan citizens and how they're being exposed to things around them, like the international teams, the Taliban.

The Navy asks us: How do you know the model is correct? But it's less about being correct [about how people interact now] and more about understanding what assumptions [about future events could] lead to. I don't know how often Afghan citizens talk to each other about the water. But I can run 20 different simulations with 20 different assumptions about that.

What is the result you're trying to achieve?

If I am in charge of some troops in Afghanistan and I have resources, money?what do I do about medical treatment, safety, education systems? Do I build wells in this village?do I build one well here, or two or three there? Or do I put money in veterinary support? Am I better off advertising on radio rather than TV, should I drop leaflets from an airplane, should I go to places of worship?so that they're hearing my message rather than my opponent's message?

It's less about predicting [whether] spending $5 changes opinions by 2 percent, and really more about: I have these five different courses of action. Which are the most likely to be successful, and why? It's about: this is the range, help me understand which will work and which won't and why. You can literally trace why.

What about examples from the business world? For instance, what did you do with Orange, the French phone company?

They were concerned about the spread of [computer] viruses over cell-phone networks. So we built a simulation of hundreds of thousands of users and how viruses can spread. We took data from real viruses and infection rates. We modeled the behavior of users. You can be on the subway, and someone else is using a phone with a virus next to you, and you're using Bluetooth and it asks to connect your headset with their phone, and if you say yes, you can catch the virus from the other phone. Or you can catch it by sending data through SMS. We predicted infection rates and helped to design strategies to prevent the spread when a virus is injected into the system.

I understand that it takes several hundred thousand dollars and up to get a predictive model project like this launched. Is there any way to bring those costs down?

That's where things are getting interesting. It's true that when we do custom projects, it is virtually impossible to get one started for less than $300,000. That's for version one working on your desktop, and it's not completely functional. And it may turn into a multiyear, multimillion dollar project.

But now, we are able to repeat work in certain industries. For instance, in consumer behavior, we've developed an agent-based simulation for measuring the return on investment for brand advertising, and we can license the tool to a client for a few thousand dollars per month. That's a spin-off company we're incubating, called Concentric ROI. So we've lowered the entry threshold, and it's much more appealing to be able to use the model for just a few months.

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Free Games I Like: Virtua School

Free Games I Like: Virtua School

Posted on 11th Dec 2010 at 12:24 by Joe Martin with 3 comments

Ah, Virtua School. Another game I played far too much of as a teenager and which I?ve bought back to life on my iPod Touch courtesy of the ill-fated iDOS. I truly love this game.

Virtua School is a text-based game which casts you as a kid starting his first day of school, forced to deal with the usual array of problems ? girls, bullies, exams and extra-curricular activities. Using multiple choice options you weave your way through these scenarios, with a single playthrough lasting around ten minutes.

What I like most about Virtua School though is the random events which are woven into each game to help make things a bit different. The changes range from big things, like bomb scares or after-school parties, to smaller alterations, like characters changing their opinions or reactions. Popular girl Liz might like you one day and hate you another.


Virtua School isn?t a revolutionarily complex game, nor is it particularly unique in any identifiable way. It?s just something simple, done really well ? and I?ve always had a soft-spot for things like that. It?s why I like beans on toast so much; it may just be beans on toast, but I cook it really well.

Virtua School was so popular when it was first released that the creators, Dana Lodico and Josh Noe, even planned on making a sequel. Unfortunately, nine years after that fact the official website still hasn?t been updated ? so it?s probably off the cards. Still, at least the original still holds up well.

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Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. Diplomatic Troubleshooter, Dies at 69

His death was confirmed by an Obama administration official.

Mr. Holbrooke was hospitalized on Friday afternoon after becoming ill while meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in her Washington office. Doctors found a tear to his aorta, and he underwent a 21-hour operation. Mr. Holbrooke had additional surgery on Sunday and had remained in very critical condition until his death.

Mr. Holbrooke?s signal accomplishment in a distinguished career was his role as the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia. It was a diplomatic coup preceded and followed by his peacekeeping missions to the tinderbox of ethnic, religious and regional conflicts that was formerly Yugoslavia.

More recently, Mr. Holbrooke wrestled with the stunning complexity of Afghanistan and Pakistan: how to bring stability to the region while fighting a resurgent Taliban and coping with corrupt governments, rigged elections, fragile economies, a rampant narcotics trade, nuclear weapons in Pakistan and the presence of Al Qaeda, and presumably Osama bin Laden, in the wild tribal borderlands.

His tenure in the Obama administration had mixed reviews. President Obama sent in more troops, as Mr. Holbrooke had wanted, but there was little military or civic progress. Mr. Holbrooke?s relationship with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was icy. Some experts said that merely avoiding disaster would have been a triumph. But many said the tenacious Mr. Holbrooke was the right man for the job.

A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter with a formidable arsenal of facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits of anger, Mr. Holbrooke dazzled and often intimidated opponents and colleagues around a negotiating table. Some called him a bully, and he looked the part: the big chin thrust out, the broad shoulders, the tight smile that might mean anything.

But admirers, including generations of State Department protégés and the presidents he served, called his peacemaking efforts extraordinary.

When he named Mr. Holbrooke to represent the United States at the United Nations, President Bill Clinton said, ?His remarkable diplomacy in Bosnia helped to stop the bloodshed, and at the talks in Dayton the force of his determination was the key to securing peace, restoring hope and saving lives.? Others said his work in Bosnia deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.

Few diplomats could boast of his career accomplishments. Early on, Mr. Holbrooke devoted six years to the Vietnam War: first in the Mekong Delta with the Agency for International Development, seeking the allegiance of the civilian population; then at the embassy in Saigon as an aide to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.; and finally in the American delegation to the 1968-69 Paris peace talks led by W. Averell Harriman and Cyrus R. Vance.

Mr. Holbrooke was the author of one volume of the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that catalogued years of American duplicity in Southeast Asia. The papers were first brought to public attention by The New York Times in 1971.

As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Carter administration, Mr. Holbrooke played a crucial role in establishing full diplomatic relations with China in 1979, a move that finessed America?s continuing commitment to China?s thorn in the side Taiwan and followed up on the historic breakthrough of President Richard M. Nixon?s 1972 visit to China.

During the Clinton presidency, Mr. Holbrooke served as ambassador to Germany in 1993-94, when he helped enlarge the North Atlantic alliance; achieved his diplomatic breakthroughs in Bosnia as assistant secretary of state for European affairs in 1994-95; and was chief representative to the United Nations, a cabinet post, for 17 months from 1999 to 2001.

At the United Nations, he forged close ties to Secretary General Kofi Annan, negotiated a settlement of America?s longstanding dues dispute, highlighted conflicts and health crises in Africa and Indonesia, and called for more peacekeeping forces. After fighting erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999, he led a Security Council delegation on a mission to Africa. He also backed sanctions against Angolan rebels in 2000.

While he achieved prominence as a cabinet official and envoy to many of the world?s most troubled arenas, Mr. Holbrooke?s was frustrated in his ambition to be secretary of state; he was the runner-up to Madeleine K. Albright, Mr. Clinton?s choice in 1997, and a contender when Mr. Obama installed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the post in 2009.

Foreign policy was his life. Even during Republican administrations, when he was not in government, he was deeply engaged, undertaking missions as a private citizen traveling through the war-weary Balkans and the backwaters of Africa and Asia to see firsthand the damage and devastating human costs of genocide, civil wars and H.I.V. and AIDS epidemics.

And his voice on the outside remained influential ? as the editor of Foreign Policy magazine from 1972 to 1977, as a writer of columns for The Washington Post and analytical articles for many other publications, and as the author of two books. He collaborated with Clark Clifford, a presidential adviser, on a best-selling Clifford memoir, ?Counsel to the President? (1991), and wrote his own widely acclaimed memoir, ?To End a War? (1998), about his Bosnia service.

Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. In the early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a Washington consulting firm, Public Strategies, which was later sold to Lehman Brothers. At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American International Group.

Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was born in Manhattan on April 24, 1941, to Dr. Dan Holbrooke, a physician, and the former Trudi Moos. He attended Scarsdale High School, where his best friend was David Rusk, son of Dean Rusk, the future secretary of state. Richard?s father died when he was 15, and he drew closer to the Rusk family.

At Brown University, he majored in history and was editor of the student newspaper. He intended to become a journalist, but after graduating in 1962 he was turned down by The Times and joined the State Department as a foreign service officer.

In 1964, Mr. Holbrooke married the first of his three wives, Larrine Sullivan, a lawyer. The couple had two sons, David and Anthony. They were divorced. His marriage to Blythe Babyak, a television producer, also ended in divorce. In 1995, he married Kati Marton, an author, journalist and human rights advocate who had been married to the ABC anchorman Peter Jennings until their divorce in 1993. Ms. Marton and his sons are among his survivors, as are his stepchildren, Christopher and Elizabeth Jennings..

After language training, he spent three years working in Vietnam. In 1966, he joined President Lyndon B. Johnson?s White House staff, and two years later became a junior member of the delegation at the Paris peace talks. The talks achieved no breakthrough, but the experience taught him much about the arts of negotiation.

In 1970, after a year as a fellow at Princeton, he became director of the Peace Corps in Morocco. He quit government service in 1972 and over the next five years edited the quarterly journal Foreign Policy. He was also a contributing editor of Newsweek International and a consultant on reorganizing the government?s foreign policy apparatus.

He worked on Jimmy Carter?s presidential campaign in 1976, and was rewarded with the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs. When Ronald Reagan and the Republicans took over the White House in 1981, Mr. Holbrooke left the government and for more than a decade focused on writing and investment banking.

When President Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. Holbrooke was named ambassador to Germany. He helped found the American Academy in Berlin as a cultural exchange center.

He returned to Washington in 1994 as assistant secretary of state for European affairs. His top priority soon became the horrendous civil war in the former Yugoslavia, a conflict precipitated by the secession of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia. Massacres, mass rapes and displaced populations, among other atrocities, were part of campaigns of ?ethnic cleansing? against Muslims.

After months of shuttle diplomacy, Mr. Holbrooke in 1995 achieved a breakthrough cease-fire and a framework for dividing Bosnia into two entities, one of Bosnian Serbs and another of Croatians and Muslims. The endgame negotiations, involving the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, unfolded in Dayton, Ohio, where a peace agreement was reached after months of hard bargaining led by Mr. Holbrooke.

It was the high-water mark of a career punctuated with awards, honorary degrees and prestigious seats on the boards of the Asia Society, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations, Refugees International and other organizations. He was 59 when he left the United Nations as the Clinton administration drew to a close.

But there was to be one more task. As Mr. Obama assumed office and attention shifted to Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke took on his last assignment. He began by trying to lower expectations, moving away from the grand, transformative goals of President George W. Bush toward something more readily achievable.

But his boss and old friend, Mrs. Clinton, expressed absolute confidence in him. ?Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the president intends to pursue,? she said. ?I admire deeply his ability to shoulder the most vexing and difficult challenges.?

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Washington Memo: In Tax Benefits to the Middle, Political Lift for Obama

But a hefty portion of the $858 billion tax package will benefit middle- and upper-middle-income Americans ? precisely the demographic that felt neglected the last two years as the White House and Congress focused on the major health care law and on helping the unemployed and people facing foreclosure.

These new tax breaks are in addition to the cuts Mr. Obama had always planned to maintain on all but the highest incomes, and they could pay big political dividends to Mr. Obama and other Democrats in 2012 ? a point that the president and some senior advisers are counting on, and one reason that they were willing to give in to Republican demands to extend all Bush-era tax rates.

Austan Goolsbee, the chairman the White House Council of Economic Advisers, appearing Sunday on ?Meet the Press? on NBC, said Mr. Obama was still convinced there was no economic benefit to continuing lower tax rates for the highest earners.

?That?s a bitter pill to have to deal with,? Mr. Goolsbee said. ?But it?s a compromise, and by giving that one piece we were able to get a series of things that I think make a big difference to the middle class and working families.?

The full scope of those goodies is fully discernible only by poring over the bill and its head-spinning array of provisions

The single most expensive component of the package ? other than the continuation of all of the marginal rates ? is a two-year adjustment of the alternative minimum tax, to prevent it from hitting millions more households. This would exempt couples' income up to $72,450 in 2010 and $74,450 in 2011 at a cost of $137 billion, according to a detailed cost analysis by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Middle- and upper-middle-income Americans will also benefit most from the one-year payroll tax cut, which will reduce the Social Security tax on income up to $106,800 to 4.2 percent from 6.2 percent. For couples with two incomes, each above the maximum, the tax savings will be $4,272. That provision will cost $112 billion.

The extension of jobless benefits, by contrast, will cost just under $57 billion, according to the joint tax committee.

And other provisions that benefit the middle class have gotten virtually no attention, including a temporary repeal of a limit on itemized deductions and repeal of the phaseout for personal exemptions. Together, those tax breaks will cost nearly $21 billion.

Mr. Goolsbee said the White House was betting that after a two-year extension of tax policies of President George W. Bush, it would be far harder for Republicans to defend the tax cuts for the wealthy in 2012, when the economy is expected to be stronger, thereby weakening their argument that allowing tax rates to rise for the rich would hamper the recovery.

?In 2012, I believe they will have to stand up and defend, on their own merits, that they think these high-income tax cuts work,? he said. ?And they will not be able to do that because they don?t.?

While the full political ramifications will not be known for months or longer, it was increasingly clear on Sunday that the tax deal would move forward.

Reluctant House Democrats predicted that the package would be approved before Congress adjourns this year, as days of rage and frustration began giving way to resignation and acceptance.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who represented House Democrats in the formal negotiations during the tax debate, said his caucus would still push to change the tax plan, particularly a provision granting a generous tax exclusion to wealthy estates. But he conceded that Democrats were not prepared to stop the entire package.

?We?re not going to hold this thing up at the end of the day,? Mr. Van Hollen said in an interview on ?Fox News Sunday.? Still, he said House Democrats were intent on testing Republicans? willingness to insist on keeping the estate tax provision, with its exemption of $5 million per person and maximum rate of 35 percent, for the next two years.

But Republicans have said they would not accept any major adjustment to the deal negotiated with the White House. Appearing on the same show, Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said he viewed Mr. Van Hollen?s remarks as a flag of surrender.

Mr. Van Hollen, in a telephone interview later on Sunday, said he had not intended to signal any change in strategy or position. ?In its current form it is not acceptable to the Democratic caucus,? he said.

And he would not predict what would happen if House Democrats changed the provision. ?That?s a question for another day,? he said

But he added, ?We do want to get this resolved by the end of the year.?

The Senate was set to hold a procedural vote on Monday and was likely to give final approval on Tuesday. And Mr. Van Hollen?s remarks suggested that the entire package could be approved by the end of this week.

In the Senate, Democrats were quicker to accept that Mr. Obama?s tradeoff could help reverse the party?s political misfortune, in which important swing voters, especially independents and women, turned toward the Republicans.

Some Senate Democrats, particularly those who, like Mr. Obama, are up for re-election in 2012, have called for a laserlike focus on the middle class in the months ahead. And while some will undoubtedly vote against the tax plan, others like Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, have quickly become vociferous supporters. Mr. Webb, who is up for re-election in 2012, has called the package ?the ultimate stimulus plan.?

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 13, 2010

An earlier version misstated the income levels that would be exempt from the alternative minimum tax.

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