Ick! Did I actually just write a headline with the words “disposable” and “battery”?! Let’s see…yep, I did. But before you get your environmentalist dander up, consider: one, I recycle; two, I use compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and three, I have a relevant story to share.

Flash-forward to three weeks ago, when my phone (it’s a Centro now, but same difference) ran out of juice and I desperately needed to make a call. I pulled the Cellboost out of the glove compartment, where it had sat, untouched, for three years. No way will this thing have a drop of power left, I thought, not after three boiling summers and three harsh winters.

About three years ago, at a CES show in Las Vegas, a PR flack handed me a Cellboost disposable battery for my Treo smartphone. “You never know when you might need it,” she winked.

(Credit:
Cellboost)

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

Apparently not. After all, AT&T’s second quarter highlighted 1.4 million subscriber gains, with a major boost from the release of the iPhone 3GS in mid-June.

Verizon Wireless also noted that it had 87.7 million customers at the end of the quarter. AT&T said it had 79.6 million.

Unfortunately, Verizon Wireless held back the number I really want to know–churn. AT&T’s churn was impressive at 1.09 percent in the second quarter. In any case, a little gamesmanship on Friday is good entertainment.

Verizon Wireless added 1.1 million subscribers in the second quarter, the company said Friday.

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

The timing of the news is odd given that Verizon reports earnings on Monday. This news couldn’t wait a few more days?

Otellini’s long-term stock option award was granted in a single year instead of spread over a number of years. The decision was to “reinforce the at risk, performance-based nature of Otellini’s total compensation package,” Intel noted in its filing.

Otellini’s total compensation package clocked in at $12.1 million last year, up from $5.9 million the previous year–an increase of 104 percent.

Otellini’s pay hike was the result of trying to bring his compensation package in line with those at peer companies, Intel said in the SEC filing. The bulk of the 2007 increase came from giving his total cash compensation a 91 percent jolt to $4.7 million, while his base pay received a 10 percent increase to $770,000.

Intel investors, meanwhile, saw the chip giant’s stock jump 33.6 percent during the year, as the Dow logged a 5 percent gain and the Nasdaq a 7.6 percent increase.

And despite more than doubling Otellini’s compensation in 2007, the Intel board’s compensation committee, according to the filing, “believes that his total compensation was still significantly below the 65th percentile (among the peer group).”

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET News.com)

Intel CEO Paul Otellini delivers a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

“For 2007, the peer group consisted of technology companies generally considered comparable to Intel as well as non-technology companies within the Fortune 100. For the peer group used in 2007, the committee’s intent was to choose companies that had one or more attributes similar to Intel’s, including semiconductor or computer design, manufacturing and integration, and large enterprises with global operations,” Intel stated in its filing.

While some investors may question the sizable bump to Otellini’s wallet, one thing to note is that about a third of the overall increase came from a long-term stock option award of 700,000 shares that was front-loaded in 2007.

“Both elements were increased in light of peer data indicating that his cash compensation was significantly below the committee’s compensation goals,” Intel said.

Intel gave CEO Paul Otellini a substantial pay raise last year, doubling the value of his compensation, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

While staggered stock option awards are often used as golden handcuffs to retain executives, it seems in this case that Intel is more interested in boosting its share price than it is worried that Otellini might bolt. After all, doubling the pay package may have addressed the latter concern.

• The zombie herd of dead retailers brought back to life grows, thanks to Systemax.

In between the blanket coverage of Ashton Kutcher and CNN’s (befuddling) race to a million Twitter followers, and the service’s giant step into the mainstream with the endorsement of one Oprah Winfrey, there was other tech news. Here’s what you may have missed this week:

• Microsoft acknowledges the widespread E74 Xbox problems and guarantees warranty coverage. Let’s hope they learned from the RROD repair fiasco.

• David Carnoy wonders, “Is Microsoft finally in the Blu-ray camp?”

(Credit:
Photobucket)

• CNET Reviews takes a gander at Acer’s new 13-inch slim laptop.

See anything we missed? Write to us at crave dot cnet dot com.

• A new, updated
Zune may or may not look like this.

Wagner James Au takes the economic viewpoint that the consequences of gold farming don’t outweigh the risks.

Call me a radical, but when launching a big-budget online game, it doesn’t strike me as a very good idea to risk alienating nearly a quarter of your user base right out the gate.

Now, those old arguments aside, I can’t see how this new generation of pond scum (new and improved, with 25 percent more scummy action!) can argue that their constant spamming of chat channels doesn’t interfere with players’ enjoyment of the game (I’m waiting for the whole “Oh, you can always just turn off chat” argument).

Gold farming is an Internet-age phenomenon in which players in less developed countries collect and sell virtual gold (common to games like World of Warcraft) to wealthier gamers in the developed world. This enables gamers who have the means to buy virtual gold to get ahead in the games without actually having to accomplish much of the grunt work.

An article titled “Why a War on Virtual Gold Sellers Makes No Sense” got me thinking about the motivations behind playing massive multiplayer online role-playing games and why virtual economies can be both helped and harmed by “gold farming.”

Well, I can’t argue with (a), they are providing a service–just like maggots, I suppose–but I’ve always argued that (b) is total and complete BS.

That, however, is likely to be the consequence of an extreme anti-gold-selling policy at Mythic Entertainment, the studio that developed Electronic Arts’ new MMORPG Warhammer Online, which is widely seen as World of Warcraft’s best competitor.

GJ: I think these gold farms indicate that the game platform has the potential to engage more people in an Internet-driven economy. The gaming workers in China don’t have skills like English, software (development), or graphic design to participate in other forms of Internet-driven work, but they can communicate and navigate in a 3D game world whose tools and routines they are familiar with…So if more social and economic activities happen in an accessible 3D game world, people who don’t have access to other culture capital but (do have access to) gaming knowledge will be more likely to be included in global interaction.

For years, lowlifes like (gold seller) IGE have told us, in defense of their behavior, that they a) are just providing a service; b) don’t interfere with players’ enjoyment of the game.

Having spent a bit of time playing WoW, I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of spam on the chat channels–especially when I was too much of a newbie to turn it off.

Like anything on the Internet that has the possibility of making money, we’ll see people try to take advantage for their own gain. Spam has made e-mail unusable without serious filtering, and there are risks that gaming could go the same way. For now, it’s up to the providers to balance the development of their own economies.

There is a paradox of trying to succeed in a game by any means necessary versus the very point of playing the game. Gold selling is also contributing to both real and virtual economic development, providing jobs for people in less developed countries, and driving revenue into game companies, as more people look to advance their game play.

Mythic’s Mark Jacobs makes a very strong counterpoint that gold farmers are destroying the game experience.

In fact, all the boring normal bugs are way more important….Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can’t stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of [self-stimulating] monkeys….

I agree. Well, it’s not that I have anything against the OpenBSD developers, or against anyone that makes security their job, but rather that I personally think computing has much bigger problems than code-level security. We’ve seen that human error (like lost laptops) leads to widespread security vulnerabilities that no amount of development can fix.

If I had to choose between a better UI for Linux and better security for Linux, I’d take the former every time. Users can improve poorly secured software by improving only behavior, but not if they won’t use the software in the first place.

It makes “heroes” out of security people, as if the people who don’t just fix normal bugs aren’t as important.

…[O]ne reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think it glorifies – and thus encourages – the wrong behavior.

Leave it to Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, to speak his mind. While many point to Linux as superior to Windows as offering superior security, Torvalds doesn’t want anyone to make a fetish of security, including the OpenBSD people to whom he addresses this classic missive:

Marketcetera just announced a $4 million series A round of venture funding with Shasta Ventures and Jack Selby, managing director and co-founder of Clarium Capital. There’s something highly appropriate in a hedge fund investing in a software company set up to help hedge funds (and others).

commentary

Marketcetera can start with algorithmic trades for hedge funds, but that’s just the beginning. As Dana at ZDNet suggests, open source is increasingly “the traditional way” that software will get done. The fact that Marketcetera is open source will help it, and certainly won’t pigeon-hole where it takes the technology or its business.

Congratulations to the Marketcetera team!

What this means is that YouTube’s player will still be the choice for individual bloggers and smaller businesses that supplement their content with videos and don’t mind YouTube’s branding and ads. For you in-betweens, better read the fine print.

But besides being vague and perhaps over-broad, the language in the TOS is perhaps too restrictive for some commercial sites, especially when there are plenty of places to acquire white-label, third-party players that allow them to include their own advertising and branding.

What this means is that users can’t insert advertising into the video or the player. And the YouTube player comes with the YouTube logo overlay. This, too, should also come as no surprise, said Roman Arzhintar, CEO of SideReel, a video search and community site.

YouTube allows people to use its player. Why shouldn’t the company make a buck by delivering ads?

A YouTube representative declined to comment.

UPDATE 3-15-08 12:20 p.m.: Some of the information in the story is found in YouTube’s Frequently Asked Questions section

“My guess is that YouTube is going to try and offer ads through that player itself,” Arzhintar said, “by including code inside of it that will pull ads from Google.”

There’s more.

Under the “Commercial Use” section of the TOS is this item: “The sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions targeted to, within, or on the API Client or YouTube video content” is prohibited without YouTube’s permission.

It has a lot to say about what you can or can’t do–particularly when it comes to any thoughts of making money. First up, the No.1 video-sharing site says plainly “the intent of the API is for noncommercial use. “More specifically, the TOS prohibits using the application programming interface for the “primary purpose of deriving revenues…such as advertising or subscription” services.

Not surprisingly, the Google-owned site doesn’t want anyone else making money off its content–especially competitors. But how much video can a commercial site post before it’s too much? What exactly does “substantially” mean?

Before you start building new applications around YouTube’s video player, it might be wise to check out the Terms of Service agreement and the Frequently Asked Questions section.

The real game-changer comes when MySpace offers a full e-commerce store–downloads, CD sales, the works–to every artist with a musician’s page on the site. That way, users would never have to leave the site to buy any music they heard on the site. The challenge would be building the infrastructure, but once things like billing and provisioning downloads are in place for the majors, it might not be much harder to set up a CDBaby-like system for everybody else.

Today, MySpace announced a deal with three of the four majors (EMI is sitting out for now) to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise through the artist pages on MySpace. This is long overdue: the music industry needs to go where their fans already are, and with 30 million people regularly listening to music on the site, it’s a mystery why the labels haven’t tried to reach these folks before now.

(Credit:
MySpace)

But major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience. The only reason you ask The Police or Death Cab to be your “friend” is to show off your impeccable taste to your real friends, the individuals and small-time artists who you’re actually connected with. These are the folks who leave individualized comments on your page and send you instant messages, and their gigs appear right alongside Radiohead’s on your home page. MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world.

But there was always a major gap: if we wanted to sell downloads, CDs, or anything else, we had to guide fans to another site or service, such as our own home page with a PayPal account or CDBaby.

MySpace is essential for independent artists. Every band I’ve played with in the last five years has had a MySpace page, and it completely changed how we did things compared with the pre-Internet days. Getting gigs, maintaining mailing lists, fliering–all of those formerly labor-intensive tasks could be accomplished by sitting in front of a computer. One group I played with got 90 percent of our gigs through other bands on our friends list. Another had a couple dozen teenage fans who’d come to every all-ages show when they read about it on our MySpace page. (We were all in our late 30s and 40s and had no idea that ska would appeal to that demographic.)

So I’m not sure that MySpace Music will be a game-changer. Fans of big bands already know where to buy merchandise–the band’s Web site, or Amazon’s CD section, or iTunes, or their local retail store. Sure, big fans who count major-label acts among their “friends” might now stay within MySpace to buy new songs from these bands, and some MySpace users might discover (and buy music from) new acts via friends of friends. But a lot of fans don’t know (or care much about) the difference between major and independent artists, and might wonder why only some acts make their wares available for purchase. The inconsistency will be confusing, and drive users back to the traditional music-buying sites (or free file-trading services, which aren’t going away).

The departments of Commerce and Agriculture have a combined $7.2 billion from the stimulus package to dole out for broadband deployment and expect to receive more than 10,000 applications for funding. The departments gathered together a number of different organizations at a public meeting Tuesday to discuss how to distribute those funds effectively and fairly, and how to hold grantees accountable.

The broadband provisions of the stimulus package included an initial set of criteria for the two departments responsible for the funds to consider, such as whether a project will increase affordability and subscribership, whether it will provide the greatest broadband speeds to the greatest population, and whether it will enhance service for health care delivery and education.

“Broadband investments should be a strategic down payment on our future,” she said. “Today’s students are tomorrow’s workforce and tomorrow’s customers.”

“There’s going to be an enormous amount of subjectivity,” Muleta said. “What we have to do is have some discretion for the people developing the program to determine how to mechanize this.”

“We’re talking about taxpayer money, we’re not here to try experimental projects,” said Lisa Scalpone. “This is a one-time jump-start and needs to be viable in the long term.”

“We’re going to have programs that are going to be funded from all different shapes and sizes, and it’s important they all have to meet the same goals,” said Amina Fazlullah, a media and telecommunications attorney for U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Jeannette Wing, assistant director of the computer and information science and engineering directorate at the National Science Foundation, suggested the government should invest not only in projects that will have short-term economic impact but also those that will pay off decades down the road.

Since the stimulus funding is seen as a down payment on universal broadband access, the program provides a good opportunity to form a broader deployment strategy, said John Muleta, the CEO of M2Z Networks.

The most important criteria, the panelists said, should be a project’s potential for job creation. Other items mentioned included timeliness, sustainability, cost, and interoperability. There was dispute, however, over whether the stimulus funds should focus on clear, immediate benefits, or potential long-term results.

In either case, panelists said, clear objectives for grantees will make it easier for the government to provide effective oversight of the broadband stimulus funds.

Meeting those goals–not to mention a host of others numerous groups would like to see addressed–means the Commerce and Agriculture departments will be in the business of picking winners and losers, panelists acknowledged.

WASHINGTON–A diverse group of organizations Tuesday agreed that the criteria for choosing which broadband projects to fund with stimulus dollars should be largely based on the potential for job creation, but they could not agree on the degree of risk the federal government should take in its broadband investments.

Others insisted the funding criteria should focus more strictly on jobs.