Gates to step down from Microsoft

The chairman of Microsoft and one of the world's richest men, Bill Gates, is stepping down from his job running the world's largest software company.

Mr Gates, who made his fortune through developing software for the personal computer, plans to devote his time to charity work.

As a teenager Bill Gates had a vision of a personal computer on every desk in every home.

He says he caught sight of the future and based his career on what he saw.

Great responsibility

The son of a successful lawyer from Seattle, Mr Gates programmed his first computer at the age of 13.

During his two years at Harvard University, he spent much of his time finessing his programming skills as well as enjoying the occasional all-night poker session.

He eventually dropped out of college and moved to Albuquerque, in New Mexico, where he set up Microsoft with his childhood friend, Paul Allen.

Their big break came in 1980 when Microsoft signed an agreement with IBM to build the operating system that became known as MS-DOS.

Microsoft went public in 1986 and within a year Bill Gates, at 31, had become the youngest self-made billionaire.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Gates explained that Microsoft benefitted because "most of our competitors were very poorly run".

"They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world."

New horizons

Now 52, he still has boyish looks, but he is no longer the world's richest man. He has been overtaken by the investor Warren Buffett and the Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim.

But Mr Gates' fortune is at the root of his decision to leave his day job and concentrate on his charitable organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

He will remain as Microsoft's chairman and work on special technology projects, but according to Mr Gates, great wealth brings great responsibility and his future work will include finding new vaccines and financing projects in the developing world.

Google Trends had unveiled a new service

Google is expected to unveil a tool Tuesday that measures Internet use to help advertisers identify the best places to buy ads that will reach its target audience, according to a report Monday on the Wall Street Journal Web site.

The measurement tools, which will be offered to advertisers and their agencies for free, will compete with services offered by established leaders Nielsen and ComScore. While those services base their estimations on selective surveys or customer panels, Google's results would be based on data collected from Web servers, providing a deeper and broader picture of Internet behavior, the newspaper reported. By giving away the new tool, Google could attract more advertising business.

The news follows Google's announcement last week that Google Trends had unveiled a new service that lets users type in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site using nothing more than organic user searches. Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and related sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session.

Yahoo Adds Two E-Mail Domains To Saturated Yahoo.com

For the first time, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) on Thursday added new e-mail domains to its long-standing Yahoo.com, which with more than 260 million subscribers worldwide has forced people to use hard-to-remember pseudonyms when signing up for an account.

The addition of ymail.com and rocketmail.com will add millions of new addresses to Yahoo Mail, and let subscribers avoid the use of such convoluted addresses as CutiePie4Ever80 or mattclark1977, the portal said.

"We recognize that people want an e-mail address that reflects who they are, whether they are signing up for an e-mail address for the first time, or simply updating their e-mail pseudonym to reflect the stage they are at in life," John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail, said in a statement.

The new addresses will open up many more options for subscribers in the United States, as well as for localized versions of the namespace in other countries, Yahoo said. People who sign up under the new domains will have access to the same features as the older domain, such as unlimited storage, integrated instant messaging, and spam and virus protection. In many markets, Yahoo will help users transfer e-mail and contacts to their new address and notify friends of the change.

The ymail.com domain is brand new for Yahoo. Rocketmail, however, stems from the 1997 acquisition of the RocketMail Web mail service. It was one of the first major free services, and it became the engine for Yahoo Mail.

E-mail is one of the legs of Yahoo's multiservice approach to communications, particularly on mobile phones. The portal this year introduced a news service called oneConnect that combines e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and social networking in one mobile platform.

Behind the scenes of Firefox 3.0

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Behind the scenes of Firefox 3.0
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There is a clear sense of anticipation building at the Mozilla Foundation's headquarters in Mountain View, California where engineers have been working for the past 34-36 months perfecting Firefox 3.0.
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A long-tailed macaque monkey looks for fish in a river in Lesan, East Kalimantan, Indonesia

Long-tailed macaque monkeys have a reputation for knowing how to find food — whether it be grabbing fruit from jungle trees or snatching a banana from a startled tourist.
Now, researchers say they have discovered groups of the silver-haired monkeys in Indonesia that fish.

Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust.

The species had been known to eat fruit and forage for crabs and insects, but never before fish from rivers.

"It's exciting that after such a long time you see new behavior," said Erik Meijaard, one of the authors of a study on fishing macaques that appeared in last month's International Journal of Primatology. "It's an indication of how little we know about the species."

Meijaard, a senior science adviser at The Nature Conservancy, said it was unclear what prompted the long-tailed macaques to go fishing. But he said it showed a side of the monkeys that is well-known to researchers — an ability to adapt to the changing environment and shifting food sources.

"They are a survivor species, which has the knowledge to cope with difficult conditions," Meijaard said Tuesday. "This behavior potentially symbolizes that ecological flexibility."

The other authors of the paper, which describes the fishing as "rare and isolated" behavior, are The Nature Conservancy volunteers Anne-Marie E. Stewart, Chris H. Gordon and Philippa Schroor, and Serge Wich of the Great Ape Trust.

Some other primates have exhibited fishing behavior, Meijaard wrote, including Japanese macaques, chacma baboons, olive baboons, chimpanzees and orangutans.

Agustin Fuentes, a University of Notre Dame anthropology professor who studies long-tailed macaques, or macaca fascicularis, on the Indonesian island of Bali and in Singapore, said he was "heartened" to see the finding published because such details can offer insight into the "complexity of these animals."

"It was not surprising to me because they are very adaptive," he said. "If you provide them with an opportunity to get something tasty, they will do their best to get it."

Fuentes, who is not connected with the published study, said he has seen similar behavior in Bali, where he has observed long-tailed macaques in flooded paddy fields foraging for frogs and crabs. He said it affirms his belief that their ability to thrive in urban and rural environments from Indonesia to northern Thailand could offer lessons for endangered species.

"We look at so many primate species not doing well. But at the same time, these macaques are doing very well," he said. "We should learn what they do successfully in relation to other species."

Still, Fuentes and Meijaard said further research was needed to understand the full significance of the behavior. Among the lingering questions are what prompted the monkeys to go fishing and how common it is among the species.

Long-tailed macaques were twice observed catching fish by The Nature Conservancy researchers in 2007, and Wich spotted them doing it two times in 1998 while studying orangutans.

The multiple challenges of exploring Antarctica

Robotic rovers have patrolled deep space and the deepest seas, but scientists are still struggling to create drones that can overcome the multiple challenges of exploring Antarctica.

Georgia Tech researchers think the SnoMote — a small robot designed like a snowmobile — will be able to deal with the nasty weather and with slippery terrain that constantly cracks and shifts.

They envision dozens of SnoMotes roving Antarctica's vast expanses to add to data already collected by satellites and a handful of weather stations and sensors.

Ayanna Howard, an associate professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, has worked for two years under a NASA grant to perfect the 2-foot-long robots.

Her initial designs with spider-like legs proved too cumbersome to navigate snowbanks. So she and her colleagues leaned on others' designs, outfitting a snowmobile designed for kids with sensors, gauges and cameras and then programming it.

She developed a program that lets the SnoMotes negotiate with each other and "bid" on which site to investigate, allowing them to decide for themselves how to dole out their assignments.

The next challenge, though, was to come up with navigation for the rovers. Other probes tend to use distinguishing characteristics like rocks to chart their paths. But such features can be hard to come by in vast icy expanses.

On a field trip to a Colorado glacier, Howard's team discovered they could use microscopic fissures in the ice and snowbanks to guide their way.

"If you can come up with a way to classify these uniquely, you can come up with a way to navigate," she said.

Simulations so far have proved her team's formula effective, but plenty of challenges await when the robot is put to the test on the glaciers of Alaska.

With Penn State University researcher Derrick Lampkin, Howard has designed a shell that weighs 60 to 70 pounds, can withstand harsh winters and eventually could include heaters to keep computers and wiring running in the cold.

Lampkin said his goal is to develop a "scale-adaptable, autonomous, mobile climate-monitoring network."

The researchers hope the robots will ultimately cost around $10,000, relatively cheap for governments, researchers and others seeking to document changing conditions in the world's most remote places.

The more the better: Howard said in order for scientists to say with certainty how climate change is affecting the ice, they need plenty of accurate data points to create climate models.

She envisions a field of 40 to 50 of the SnoMotes wandering icy plains, a small army gathering data to shed light on global warming and other quandaries without breaking the bank.

Online social networking

Online social networking today is more about hanging out with friends behind gated communities than exploring the World Wide Web: Visit another site and you'll have to rebuild your profile from scratch.

That's like having to get a new driver's license for every state you drive through.

Although the walls that keep users from taking their data wherever they go are starting to erode, how much three recently announced programs will help users move among the networks remains to be seen. Google Inc.'s attempt to break those fortifications was quickly blocked by Facebook.

The two leading online hangouts, News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook, have promised to release tools in the coming weeks for Web sites to incorporate profile data, friends lists and other social functions. Google followed with its own program for bridging various networks.

MySpace users, for instance, can soon have their biographical information appear on eBay Inc. profiles. A social network focused on skiing will be able to incorporate Facebook photos and friends list rather than build its own.

It's all done through software hooks that let eBay and others grab profile data from MySpace and Facebook. Changes made at MySpace and Facebook are quickly propagated because third-party sites can't store the data and must check back frequently.

The new programs come as users increasingly complain about having to retype basic profile information over and over. By holding onto users' information while letting them bring temporary copies of it elsewhere, Facebook and MySpace can remain at the core of users' social interactions and keep them from leaving.

More important than saving keystrokes, the programs bring along the meaning and connections behind the data, allowing social circles to travel from site to site, much as friends going bar hopping together don't have to start conversations afresh at each pub.

That said, there are no current plans to exchange profile data between MySpace and Facebook. Message postings at one won't show up at the other, and party invites still will have to be copied and pasted to cross services.

Google's new Friend Connect comes close to merging those lives, though. When announced, it was to pool profile data from Facebook, Google Talk, Google's Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5, though not MySpace.

But within days, Facebook began blocking Google, saying it couldn't ensure anyone's privacy if Google were the intermediary.

Such concerns are simply a convenient way to play down underlying desires for control, said Deborah Pierce, who tracks social-networking privacy as executive director of Privacy Activism.

"They get to say, `We're being the good guys on privacy,' but they are still retaining control of your personal data," Pierce said.

Some startups aren't waiting. Minggl and Zude both promise to help users aggregate data from their various networks, including MySpace and Facebook.

There are some legitimate privacy concerns.

"In many models, something becomes public once and it becomes public forever," said Dave Morin, a senior platform manager at Facebook. "We believe in giving users control. If we move too quickly we might not achieve that."

Users must agree before a third-party site can access their data, but they sometimes change their minds. Facebook and MySpace say restricting outside storage of data ensures that other sites get the latest information, whether it's an updated user photo or a revocation of consent.

Service providers also have to consider that people may agree to be friends in the specific community — not across the Web.

So with Google's and Facebook's programs, both parties have to agree to be on a third-party site before appearing on a friends list. Although that policy extends only to minors on MySpace, adults can opt out of appearing on friends lists on other sites by visiting a new online control panel.

E-mail addresses and other non-profile data are off limits under the programs, as are profiles the services have assembled behind the scenes for ad targeting.

MySpace said it is working on giving users even more privacy controls. Eventually, MySpace users will be able to specify that only photos go to site A and friends lists to site B, rather than all or nothing for a particular site. Facebook said third-party developers could build that granularity themselves, while Google was considering it.

Ultimately, users will have to decide whether they really want to mix work-related LinkedIn contacts with the party photos on Facebook.

"I don't know if people want their worlds colliding," said Rachel Happe, a research manager at IDC. "I don't think this push to share data should go too quickly."

Fred Stutzman, a University of North Carolina researcher who tracks online social networks, said users sometimes leave for other networks so they can start over.

Jim Benedetto, senior vice president for technology at MySpace, said social networks will likely open more once they sort out the technical and privacy challenges — much as AOL and CompuServe users can now send e-mail to people who use all other e-mail services. Instant-messaging services, meanwhile, remain in walled gardens even today.

Bill Washburn, whose OpenID Foundation promotes universal usernames and passwords, said social networks will come to realize that openness makes their respective services even more powerful.

They just need to work on a common approach, said Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks, a startup building tools to bridge networks.

"It's kind of a step forward and a half-step back," Bickel said. "It may take a year or two to shake all that out, but it definitely accelerates the timeline."