'World's Cheapest Laptop' Now Available

A company is now selling what it calls the "world's cheapest laptop," which at US$130, is not a bad deal if you can bear some hardware limitations.

The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software.

There's a caveat though-- it has to bought in bulk, in units of 100. The laptop is available on Alibaba.com through the online store of Taiwanese company Carapelli Ltd.

The cheapest laptop to date was known to be One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop, available at $188 for a limited time late last year. While a technological landmark, it had some hardware limitations like a slow processor and limited graphics capabilities.

The laptop hints towards a trend of lowering PC prices. Last week, a company called CherryPal introduced a $249 mini-desktop, also running a 400MHz processor, with 256M bytes of RAM and 4G bytes of internal flash storage.

In a recent interview with the IDG News Service, former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen said she would bring out a $75 laptop by 2010. Now running her own company, Pixel Qi, she cited the falling prices of RAM and components as a way to bring down laptop prices.

The low-cost laptop industry's poster child is Asustek Computer's Eee PC, which was introduced last year and sold 350,000 PCs in its first quarter. The cheapest Eee PC, for $300, has an 800MHz Intel processor, 512M bytes of RAM and 2G bytes of flash storage.

Under Your Thumb? Tiny Drives, Big Risks

Hackers always are on the lookout for the most vulnerable spot on your personal computers. These days, that weakest link might be your flash thumb drive.Thumb drives -- which can fit gigabytes of documents, music and video on a stick about the size of a pack of gum -- are a convenient way to shuffle files among different computers. They plug into your computer's universal serial bus port and appear as a hard drive on your PC.Their growing popularity, huge storage capacity and ability to load a computer's essential system files makes them an inviting target for hackers, too.

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Google launches virtual experience website

Google Inc on Tuesday launched a three-dimensional virtual experience website to match popular virtual world Second Life. The service, called "Lively," uses real-time virtual world characters known as avatars and three-dimensional graphics to congregate in virtual rooms.Linden Lab's Second Life, launched five years ago, was the first online community with its own currency and a growing economy and avatars."If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose," Niniane Wang, engineering manager, who oversaw Lively's creation, said on Google's official blog.Lively also allows for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside the rooms, Wang said.Google worked closely with Arizona State University, while developing the website.

Flickr turns to Getty to sell amateur photos

Flickr, a popular online photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo Inc., is teaming up with Getty Images to offer shutterbugs a chance to turn their hobby into a moneymaking endeavor. Under a partnership announced this week, Getty's editors will peruse Flickr to find pictures that may appeal to newspapers, magazines, book publishers, advertising agencies and other businesses. Getty will then contact photographers who posted shots with sales potential to see if they're interested in licensing the pictures. Any ensuing sales will be split between Getty and the participating photographers.The arrangement marks the latest example of how the Web is creating opportunities for people outside the traditional media industry to get paid for their photographic, writing or reporting skills. The phenomenon is sometimes known as "citizen journalism."

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Internet addressing agency loses its own addresses

This doesn't sound good: The nonprofit agency in charge of the Internet's addresses recently lost track of its own.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said it happened when an Internet registration company it oversees got fooled into transferring the domain names to someone else.

The attack was quickly noticed, and ICANN's domain names were restored within 20 minutes. However, because many Internet directories retain information for a day or two, visitors could have been redirected to an unauthorized site for longer.

ICANN said Thursday that new, unspecified security measures should prevent such attacks in the future. The organization also said it was reviewing other security procedures.

The domain names hijacked were ICANN.com and IANA.com — for the ICANN subdivision known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Visitors to those addresses are normally redirected automatically to the organization's main sites at ICANN.org and IANA.org, neither of which was affected by the attack.

Adobe releases tools to improve Flash video search

nternet users will now have an easier time finding sites that rely heavily on the popular Flash video format.

Adobe Systems Inc., the format's developer, has released a customized version of its Flash Player software that allows Google Inc.'s search engine and others to see the elements of Web pages embedded with Flash content the same way a human would.

Search crawlers, the programs that find and index content for search engines, currently have a difficult time "seeing" non-text formats.

Although they can often index static text and links within basic Flash files, many Web pages associated with Flash video are dynamically generated on the fly as visitors are ready to view them. And some Web pages are now designed almost entirely in Flash, with menus and other features embedded within the Flash video.

Adobe's new tools help search crawlers navigate dynamic Flash pages more easily. Google's crawlers, for instance, will be able to click buttons along the way and remember the information for the index.

"Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users," Bill Coughran, Google's senior vice president of engineering, said in a statement.

Google already is using the new tools and Yahoo Inc. plans to soon. Adobe plans to extend support to other search engines.

Web designers don't need change the way they do anything to accommodate the upgrade.

There are limits, however. Google is indexing only actual text within Flash files — not text presented as images such as the words on a street sign. So Google's YouTube video clips still aren't covered because they don't contain embedded text.

Keeping a landline number on your cell phone

Q: I want to get rid of my landline phone service and go all wireless, but I don't want to lose my home phone number. Can I transfer it to my cell phone?

A: Probably. In a lot of cases, it's possible to transfer, or "port" in industry jargon, a landline number to a cell phone.

Tell your cell phone carrier, which needs to have coverage in the area where you have the landline. The carrier will start the administrative process. Unfortunately, that process is a lot more cumbersome than the process of moving a cell phone number from one carrier to another. It can take weeks.

Once the port completes, you lose your old cell phone number. If you want to keep both the landline and the cell phone number, things get a bit complicated.

You could get a second cell phone, and have the landline number transferred to it. You wouldn't need to actually carry both phones — you could have all calls to the second phone forwarded to the first phone. Ask your carrier how to do this, which usually just involves entering some numbers on the keypad. But a second phone, with service, is costly.

Another solution, that should be cheaper, is to port the landline number to an Internet calling company, also known as a VoIP provider, for Voice over Internet Protocol. Much like cell phone carriers, they are able to accept landline ports in most areas, though the process can be slow and problematic.

Once you've transferred the number to the VoIP provider, set the service to forward all calls to your existing cell phone number.

You'll be paying the VoIP provider, but that cost can be kept low, especially if you don't get many calls. A good plan is to stop handing out the landline number and tell callers to use your cell phone number next time, so you can phase out the VoIP service.

A VoIP provider called VoiceStick can facilitate this with a plan it calls Next2Nothing, with no monthly fees. Calls forwarded to a U.S. number cost 3.2 cents per minute.

Another VoIP company, Callcentric, charges $5.95 per month for unlimited call forwarding, after $25 for porting over a number and a $5.95 setup fee.

If you're a T-Mobile USA customer, you can sign up for VoIP for $10 a month. You'll also need to buy a $50 Internet router and plug your landline phone into it.

The VoIP workaround is, incidentally, a good trick if you're moving and want to keep your landline number. If you're moving more than a short distance, you usually can't keep your landline number, even if you sign up for landline service at the new residence. But if you "park" the number with a VoIP service and forward it to your new line, you can keep receiving those calls.

A couple of caveats that apply to all the scenarios above:

• Do not cancel your landline service before the transfer has completed, or you might lose your number.

• Once you've transferred your number to a cell carrier or a VoIP provider, transferring it back to a landline will be difficult or impossible. In fact, people report problems getting numbers of any kind ported from VoIP providers, even though the companies are required to support this.

Microsoft reportedly to cut price of Xbox 360 to $299

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) plans to cut the price of its best-selling Xbox 360 Pro model by $50, to $299 in the next few weeks, the Hollywood Reporter reported citing anonymous sources.

The price cut for the Xbox 360 model with the 20 gigabyte hard drive will come before the video game industry's biggest trade show, E3, taking place in Los Angeles on July 15-17, the report said.

Rumors of the Xbox price cut swirled on popular gaming blogs Joystiq and Kotaku last week. The two sites received snapshots of Kmart and Radio Shack flyers advertising the $299 price.

A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.

Microsoft last cut the price of the Xbox Pro in August, from $399 to $349, prior to the release of "Halo 3" the following month.

A cut to $299 would make the Xbox 360 Pro $100 less than one of the console's major rivals, Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation 3 with a 40 gigabyte hard drive.

Microsoft is locked in a three-way competition with Nintendo's (7974.OS) Wii and the PlayStation 3, which comes with a high-definition Blu-ray video player.

Source: Yahoo News