PC makers opening new windows
With the launch of Windows 7 this week, PC makers are trying some new things, including laptops with touch screens. Acer Inc. is going further — introducing a laptop with a 3-D screen.
The abstrusely named Acer Aspire 5738DG-6165 has a 15.6-inch screen that, with the help of special glasses, appears to take on depth if used with the right games or movies.
It’s not the first laptop with a 3-D screen. Sharp Corp. introduced one in 2003. It worked without glasses, but the viewer had to be somewhat careful to keep his head in the right place for the 3-D effect to work. The screen worked similarly to 3-D postcards — the kind with the ribbed plastic layer — but looked more convincing. Like Acer’s model, the 3-D effect could be turned off with a button.
Sharp’s model cost $3,300 and was aimed at engineers and other professionals who might be helped by being able to show objects in 3-D. Acer’s laptop costs just $780, barely more than a comparable, normal laptop.
Windows 7 doesn’t have special features for 3-D screens, so Acer will ship the computer with special movie player software. Finding movies to play on it won’t be easy, however — there’s no real consumer distribution system for the new 3-D movies that are shown in theaters, such as “Aliens vs. Monsters.”
Supplying perceived demand for books
Some of technology’s best-known firms are betting there’s pent-up demand for on-demand books.
Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s top seller of personal computers and printers, is teaming with Amazon.com Inc. to join Internet search leader Google Inc. as the latest entrants in the quirky new market of re-creating digital books as paperbacks.
The concept represents a different type of book recycling, as digital copies created from print get a second life as paperbacks.
Publishing a single copy of a digital book usually can be done in a few minutes, allowing consumers to order a paperback version of a title that’s out-of-print or only available in one or two libraries in the world.
Under the program announced Wednesday, HP is providing technology to clean up the digital copies of about 500,000 books in the University of Michigan’s library before they are republished as paperbacks. The books are all considered part of the public domain, no longer protected under copyright. The paperback copies can be ordered through Amazon.com and a few other retailers.
Most of the digital copies in the University of Michigan’s collection were scanned by Google.
Google embraced the concept of on-demand book publishing in a partnership launched last month. The deal allows a small company called On Demand Books to sell paperback versions of about 2 million digital books that Google has scanned into its index during the past five years.
Fewer broadband restrictions sought
AT&T Inc. is encouraging employees to join its lobbying campaign against proposed federal rules that would restrict the ways broadband companies can manage traffic on their networks.
The Federal Communications Commission has asked the public to be part of an online conversation as it begins writing “network neutrality” rules, and has set up a blog to gather comments.
AT&T’s top lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, sent a letter to the company’s U.S. managers on Sunday urging them, their families and their friends to use the blog, http://blog.openinternet.gov, to call on the agency “not to regulate the Internet.” He offered tips on what points to make in the blog posts.
Those include reminders that net neutrality rules would “halt private investment in broadband infrastructure,” threaten “the jobs associated with that investment” and “jeopardize the very goals supported by the Obama administration that every American have access to high-speed Internet services.”
Art Brodsky, a spokesman for the public interest group Public Knowledge, says AT&T is exploiting employee fears about job security to try to sway the public debate about net neutrality.
But Michael Balmoris, an AT&T spokesman, dismisses that charge. “We were providing important information to our employees, and it was up to them to respond personally,” he said.
Associated Press
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