Here at CNET we write about all sorts of gadgets and toys, but I’ve noticed that when I write about high-end gear I get the biggest reaction.

The B25 tower speaker’s 42-inch-tall cabinet is fabricated from high-density fiberboard and birch plywood. Standard finishes include Aluminum Laminate, Makassar, or Elsberry veneers. Burmester can custom finish speakers to your exact specification. Burmesters decked out in gloss white with chrome baffles are among the most beautiful speakers I’ve ever seen.

The 032 amplifier in all its German splendor

My complete review is on the “Home Entertainment” Web site.

High-end audio isn’t so different, but it’s more private. High-end buyers’ families and friends are the only ones who’ll ever get to be bowled over by the sound and looks of their spectacular audio systems. So while you’ve probably heard of Jaguar, chances are you’re less familiar with high-end audio brands. I’m here to help raise awareness of quality audio.

(Credit:
Burmester)

Right from the get-go the Burmester duo’s wide-open imaging and sonic purity were hard to miss. Feed the Burmester system high-quality recordings and it will reward your ears with dazzling resolution of fine detail.

The 032’s mirrored surfaces will reflect your room’s color and lighting, so the electronics disappear more than your average high-end component would. Each assembled 032 is run through a 300-point computer test regime, the amplifier is then played for a solid week, and then put through the complete 300-point testing process again. The first and second test results must be identical before the amp moves onto final testing. Each and every Burmester undergoes a thorough listening test before it leaves the factory.

I write about the world’s best audio gear for “Home Entertainment” magazine, and I recently had the pleasure of testing the Burmester 032 integrated stereo amplifier ($22,495) and B25 speakers ($11,995/pair). Burmester is based in Berlin, Germany. The company builds the sort of hi-fis a Jaguar owner would buy.

Burmester B25 speakers

(Credit:
"Home Entertainment" magazine)

I like hearing about stuff I can’t afford, like the recent road test of the $80,000 Jaguar XFR. The big sedan can hit 162 mph, can stop from 150 in 6 seconds, and it’s a ball to drive fast. Funny, the road tester never mentioned fuel economy. There you go, people don’t buy $80,000
cars for their practicality, they buy them to be seen in and for how well they perform.

Microsoft said that it now expects to make the converter available by late June. Most recently the company had said final converters would be released six to eight weeks after Office 2008 was released in the U.S. However, that timeline was already delayed from Microsoft’s original plan, which called for the tools to be available by late 2006 or early 2007.

“The team is mobilized to get Office 2008 updates out as soon as possible,” Microsoft said in a blog posting. “As a result we are pushing back the release of the final Open XML File Format Converter Update to Office 2004 for Mac.”

Microsoft offered
Mac fans both good news and bad news on Thursday, and it all depends on which version of Office for Mac one is using.

By further delaying the converters as more documents are created in Office 2007’s new file formats, the software maker is creating more headaches for Mac users, particularly those with older systems. Microsoft does have a beta version of its converter.

They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent’s traffic.
They have advertising solutions that can be tailored–as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you’d only take less than 8% of their market share…
They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don’t have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me….
They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases….

After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won’t likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they’re still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that’s not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish’s public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I’d still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I’ve written about.

This wouldn’t bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: “Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what’s the deal guys?

On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge’s coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell “develop” while saying “men from the east” aren’t that smart.

Whoever wrote the comment, its laundry list of reasons users and especially advertisers might like Baidu is informative. I just wish credit had been given to whoever was the original author. (Also there’s a “next week” below that doesn’t work on the second posting since it was more than a week after the first.) Here’s the list:

The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge’s name on Rick’s Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an “upstart” engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu’s music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)

In an elaborate robbery scheme that’s one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities.

“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

It appears to have unfolded this way, according to a Seattle-based NBC affiliate: around 11:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, the robber, wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask went over to a guard who was overseeing the unloading of cash to the bank from the truck. He sprayed the guard with pepper spray, grabbed his bag of money, and fled the scene.

Authorities eventually found the getaway inner tube (a getaway inner tube!) and suspect that accomplices may have picked up the robber in a boat. According to the NBC affiliate, police hope to track him down by figuring out who posted the Craigslist ad in the first place.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark was not immediately available for comment.

But here’s the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery–wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

The legal battle began when Brian Sapient, a longtime skeptic of Geller’s, used footage from a NOVA documentary to create a 14-minute video on YouTube debunking Geller’s powers. Geller’s company, Explorogist, sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice to YouTube because some of the NOVA material–about 8 seconds–was under copyright owned by Explorogist. YouTube suspended Salient’s account, making his videos unavailable for about two weeks.

Uri Geller

Sapient and the Electronic Frontier Foundation subsequently filed suit against Geller, claiming that those 8 seconds were permissible under U.S. fair use laws. That would mean Explorogist breached the DCMA requirement that anyone filing a takedown notice must state, “under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”

(Credit: UriGeller.com)

The offending video

Explorogist, in turn, filed a lawsuit of its own, arguing that the copyrighted footage was used “within a sequence of cinematographic images” that “infringed the plaintiff’s copyright.” EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry said the language in lawsuit filed by Explorogist was in the “UK context”–from where Explorogist is based. However, “our position was that the use in question was fair use,” she said.

Controversial “paranormalist” Uri Geller has settled a lawsuit claiming he misused copyright law to squelch criticism. But much like Geller’s mysticism, the legitimacy of his legal dispute remains rather ambiguous–the terms of the settlement are mostly confidential.

“Photo Gallery is focused on the consumer experience. We’re looking at things more interesting to prosumers that would be complementary to Photo Gallery,” Weisberg said. “We’re also looking at Expression Media on the high end and walking a fine line between the two.

“We’ll be releasing a DNG codec shortly,” said Lightroom leader Tom Hogarty in an e-mail. That will help out other Microsoft software such as Windows Photo Gallery that uses WIC to show image thumbnails and print photos.

I tried a pre-production version of the software and found it rough around the edges but a refreshingly thorough attempt to tackle the geotagging challenge.

“People are doing a lot more geotagging, but it’s still somewhat cumbersome,” said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft’s director of digital imaging evangelism. “We want to make it mainstream.”

Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools lets photographers geotag their photos and show where they are on a map.

“We’ve talked about making it extensible to third parties, but…It’s a big question. I haven’t decided yet whether we’re going to do it,” Weisberg said.

That’s because geotagging, done well, enables people to find photos by searching for the word “Paris” rather than sifting through folders with obscure filenames like IMG_5829.jpg or squinting at hundreds of image thumbnails. Until the still-distant day when computers can recognize your Aunt Polly or the Grand Canyon, geotagging holds potential as a way for people to get a handle on ever-growing digital photo collections.

He also views Pro Photo Tools as a strong statement about what Microsoft can accomplish by building off its existing Windows infrastructure. “One hundred days ago, I wrote a memo,” launching the project. “One hundred days later, we have a product. That’s not typical Microsoft.”

Weisberg shied away from competitive analysis, but agreed that Pro Photo Tools is designed to help make Windows more compelling. “It’s focused on making the platform better for photographers,” Weisberg said.

Looking at the digital photography software market, it’s easy to imagine Adobe Systems is a competitor. But it looks to me like this is actually positioned more against Apple whose computers are popular among “creative professionals” and come with iPhoto editing software.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today’s technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road.

To run the software on Windows XP, users must have installed the Windows Imaging Component, the image-handling engine built for Vista but also available for Windows XP. WIC is likely to become more mainstream soon on XP: it’s built into Service Pack 3.

What does the software portend for its overall digital imaging strategy? Weisberg is cagey, and given that Microsoft axed its Digital Image Suite product a year after it acquired iView Multimedia and its software to manage digital photos and other digital files, reading the tea leaves can be difficult.

Happily, Adobe plans to fill in the DNG codec gap.

One nice feature of WIC is that raw-image processing engines called codecs can be plugged in. Unlike Adobe and Apple, Microsoft relies on camera makers to supply the codecs for their formats. That means the company is wedded to them for support, but the major manufacturers all have released codecs, and relying on the manufacturer means Microsoft doesn’t have to worry as much that writing data to raw files will corrupt them.

Microsoft doesn’t see Pro Photo Tools as competing either with the Expression Media product from iView Multimedia or with Microsoft’s basic browsing and editing software, the Windows Photo Gallery package built into Vista or its more elaborate alternative, Windows Live Photo Gallery.

One shortcoming, though, comes with Sony’s codec, which doesn’t let people write metadata such as keywords or geotags to its raw files.

One annoyance for me was the lack of a free codec to handle Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format. A company called ArdFry Imaging offers one for $29.95, but that seemed like a lot to pay for a plug-in for a free tool.

Geotagging is just the opening salvo, though. Pro Photo Tools can be extended with new features; Microsoft is working on some and is considering whether to allow other companies also join in, Weisberg said.

Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and on Thursday plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows.

But new features are en route. Microsoft plans another announcement at the Photokina show in September in Germany.

Pro Photo Tools has a slider that lets people correct mismatches between the time recorded by a camera and GPS unit. Thumbnails of images pop up that can be matched with actual locations.

Pro Photo Tools’ future
Weisberg wouldn’t detail much about what new modules are next for Pro Photo Tools beyond a few smaller features such as batch renaming to let photographers rename photos in bulk or a “painter” tool to let location tags or other metadata quickly be copied from one image and pasted to another.

I had some problems on Windows XP with the software showing being unable to show larger versions of the photos and some other problems writing geodata to Canon’s CR2 raw files. Weisberg said both problems have been fixed, and it worked fine with Nikon’s NEF format.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Pro Photo Tools’ origin
The software is an outgrowth of the Microsoft Photo Info software the company released in 2007 to help photographers label some images with metadata such as copyright notices, captions, and titles, but it’s expanded considerably.

The software can process data from a handheld GPS unit that shows where a photographer roamed, adding the latitude and longitude data to photos depending on when they were taken. That’s how existing geotagging software typically works, but Pro Photo Tools has some more distinguishing features, too.

Microsoft wants Pro Photo Tools to be a work in progress–a frequently updated utility that evolves rapidly. “It’s the evolving software model,” Weisberg said.

For one thing, it also lets photographers assign locations to photos by placing pushpins on an online map. For another, it adds rough geographic coordinates based just on a region name, such as “Boston.” It can work with many of the proprietary “raw” image formats that higher-end digital cameras produce. And perhaps most significant, it uses Microsoft’s Windows Live Local interface to add text fields such as region, city, and street to the photo.

This should be a wake-up call to Microsoft. The company has been slow to compete in this area. Many of the most sought-after products, such as Apple’s iPhone or Asus’ Eee PC do not use Windows. Also, with Vista, Microsoft has created an operating system that requires more hardware, while the trend for these devices are to use slower, more energy efficient processors, along with more limited capacity flash memory.

That said, if Gartner is even close to on point, there are plenty of trends that could be worrisome for Microsoft. First and foremost is the research firm’s prediction that Apple will double its U.S. and western Europe market share by 2011.

Also of note for Microsoft watchers, Gartner predicts that within five years fully 80 percent of commercial software will include elements of open-source technology.

Let’s start with a disclaimer. Five-year forecasts are nearly always wrong and I have no reason to think Gartner’s will be any different. Things tend to happen much faster or much slower than people initially forecast.

On the software-as-a-service front, Gartner is estimating that by 2012, businesses will be spending a third of their application budget on subscription products, as opposed to product licenses. The firm also believes that forward thinking businesses will start buying their IT infrastructure as a service.

“Increased high-speed bandwidth makes it practical to locate infrastructure at other sites and still receive the same response times,” Gartner said. “This trend to accepting commodity infrastructure could end the traditional ‘lock-in’ with a single supplier and lower the costs of switching suppliers.”

“Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported,” Gartner said. “They provide significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment. Ignoring this will put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage.”

Among its other predictions, Gartner is predicting a huge rise in 3D printers, ever more environmental focus and a trend of businesses bowing to end user demand for a larger number of hardware and software purchases. What do you make of Gartner’s guesses? Which are spot-on and which are off-base?

Best Buy is warning customers who purchased its Insignia 10.4-inch Digital Picture Frames that their device may be harboring a virus, according an advisory posted on its Web site over the weekend.

French, meanwhile, is checking into the number of users who purchased the Insignia 10.4-inch picture frame, as well as the name and type of virus that is loaded onto the device. Stay tuned…

Best Buy, which sells the picture frames under its private label Insignia, has since pulled all remaining 10.4-inch Insignia picture frames and inventory from its shelves and Web site, and has discontinued the product’s production. No recall, however, has been issued.

(Credit:
Insignia)

Insignia digital frames, with model number NS-DPF10A, may be infected with the virus, Best Buy states in its posting. The company is asking users to contact its Insignia customer care number, 877-467-4289, to determine whether their digital picture frame is infected and how to troubleshoot the virus that can travel through the USB cord and infect a user’s PC.

Users who connect their Insignia picture frame to a Windows based PC may be at risk, but no other platforms are affected, she noted.

In the meantime, Best Buy is contacting all users who purchased the picture frames to warn them of the virus and determine whether their device has been infected, French said. She added that not all of the 10.4-inch picture frames are harboring the virus.

Best Buy learned of the problem in the first week of January, after receiving several customer complaints, said company spokeswoman Nissa French. It took a couple weeks for the company to ascertain the problem, which it attributes to a virus that was loaded onto the devices during the manufacturing process.

Say cheese…not.

Best Buy’s digital picture frame virus is among a number of other holiday devices that have hit the scene with some funky security issues.

(Credit:
Andy Purdy)

In August, HBGary has announced a partnership with McAfee to provide forensic tools for its enterprise offerings. HBGary specializes in monitoring information systems for external and internal threats.

Purdy, while a member of the White House, co-drafted the 2003 edition of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, then joined the Department of Homeland Security. There, he served on the tiger team that helped to form the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). He went to head both organizations and was dubbed by the media as the “cyberczar” of the United States until DHS appointed Greg Garcia as assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications.

In 2006, Purdy oversaw the first large-scale mock cyberattack, code-named Cyber Storm. A second mock attack, under Garcia, was held earlier this year.

Some users were upset when Dell upgraded the graphics in newer models of the M1730 to the 8800M GTX. The XPS 1730 with the 8800M GTX earned a score of almost 13,500 in 3Dmark06–which is about a 49 percent performance gain over two 8700M GT cards in the same notebook.

There will be two options. One will be done with an “installation package” and the other will be a “do-it-yourself kit.”

(Credit:
Dell)

Dell XPS M1730 notebook with Nvdia 8800M GTX

Dell said that the MediaDirect “incompatibility means that the MediaDirect software needs to be upgraded. Unfortunately, the upgrade will require a reformat and reinstallation. Beyond that, it will also require you to repartition the hard disk to make room for the new version of MediaDirect, which is a bit larger. Data loss has been a major concern for the engineers working on a solution. At this point, it would appear that there’s really no way around wiping the drive to make the upgrade work with every feature.”

There is one gotcha though. “MediaDirect 3.3 is not compatible with the driver for the (new) Nvida card,” Dell said. MediaDirect is a Dell technology that enables a user to watch DVD movies, slideshows, or listen to music without having to boot the complete XP operating system. MediaDirect is installed in a special partition on the hard disk drive. When the computer is off, pressing the MediaDirect button will boot the MediaDirect partition instead of XP.

The upgrade from the Nvidia dual 8700M GT to dual 8800M GTX graphics is in the works and will likely be released later this month, according to Dell.

“In other words, games like Crysis, BioShock, Far Cry 2 and Age of Conan will scream,” Dell said.

“Considering the number of screws holding this beast together, most people will probably want the installation,” Dell said.