Gadget & Tech

Federal District Judge Kenneth Karas has ordered that Mark Papermaster “immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc until further order of this court.” IBM had sought the injunction citing an agreement with Papermaster in which he would not work with any competitor for a year after leaving the Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant. IBM, filed a lawsuit against him last week, claiming that he broke the terms of a noncompete contract with IBM in accepting a high-profile job with Apple. InformationWeek spotted Papermaster’s formal response Friday morning, in which he declares that the two companies are not competitors and that his experience at IBM is not the primary reason why Apple sought his services.

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Lala is a site for online music since 2005. Lala users can swap used CDs using prepaid envelops for only $1 per trade and later it allowed users to browse for music. Now Lala has announced that will let its users stream music for 10 cents per song.
If the user wants to listen again to a particular song he or she will have to pay 10 cents, allowing the user to listen to that song online whenever he or she wants.

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Temperatures in the Arctic last fall hit an all-time high – more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Centigrade) above normal – and remain almost as high this year, an international team of scientists reported Thursday.

“The year 2007 was the warmest year on record in the Arctic,” said Jackie Richter-Menge, a climate expert at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H, and editor of the latest annual Arctic Report Card.

“These are dynamic and dramatic times in the Arctic,” she said. “The outlook isn’t good.”

Arctic temperatures naturally peak in October and November, after sea ice shrinks during the summer. The shrinkage lets more of the sun’s rays heat the ocean rather than be reflected back into space.

As a result, the ocean is warming and causing global sea levels to rise even faster than predicted, according to the Arctic Report Card, the product of 46 scientists from 10 countries.

Summer 2007 set a record low for sea ice in the Arctic, threatening reindeer, walruses and polar bears and opening shipping lanes above the Arctic Circle, the report said. This summer’s ice melt was only slightly smaller.

“There has been a massive loss of sea ice starting in the 1990s,” said one of the authors, James Overland, an Arctic expert at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “In 2008, we’ve lost so much multi-year old ice, it’s very difficult for the ice cover to go back to where it was 20 years ago.”

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Mozilla has just pushed out Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 to their servers, marking the first major step toward the official 3.1 release. They haven’t yet officially announced the beta release yet. Firefox 3.1 will introduce geolocation to the mix, streamlining the process required to get information from web sites based on your location. In the current release of Firefox, you needed to install the previously mentioned Geode extension to get this functionality, but it comes baked into 3.1.

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Richard Garriott, famed video game developer, is following in his father’s footsteps and has launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Richard’s father Owen Garriott is a former NASA astronaut who completed two space missions during his career. Richard is the the first second generation American in space, and also the sixth private astronaut client of Space Adventures.

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Zoho made some significant changes to a core part of its cloud-based application suite Friday: its online mail application now works offline and with Apple’s iPhone, and the beta test is now publicly available.

The offline and mobile features are major areas of development for Web-based applications, and cloud computing advocates including Zoho, Yahoo, and Google are racing to build in those features. Offline access helps ameliorate Web-based applications’ limitations when no network is available, and mobile access helps fulfill one of the big promised advantages of Web applications: access your documents any time you do have network access.

Offline access, which in Zoho’s case is enabled with Google’s Gears technology, lets people read and write mail in the browser even when not connected to the network. “Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can respond to your emails as you would normally. When you go back online these emails will be sent out from your outbox,” the company said Friday.

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Google’s Picasa photo editing tool for Linux has caught up to its Windows sibling with a new beta 3 release. The latest version of Picasa for Linux packs in all the features from the recent Windows beta, save one — there’s no slideshow movie feature.

The lack of slideshow movies is due to shortcomings in Wine, which powers Picasa for Linux. But the latest version packs in enough new features to keep most users happy.

The most notable of the changes are vast improvements to the way Picasa integrates with other apps. For instance, it now uses your preferred file manager to show files on disk and can use your default e-mail program to send photos directly from Picasa.

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Samsung will start shipping two ultra-low power desktop PCs soon, the MV100 and the MZ100 Slim Tower. Both will use Intel’s G43 chipset with support for Intel’s Core 2 Duo, Quad and Celeron processors, though exactly which CPUs Samsung will ship the PCs with is unknown. The desktops’ main selling point, however, should prove to be their low power consumption ratings of just 1W while in stand-by mode and 60W while operating in power saving mode.

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The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope was today officially dubbed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in honor of Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi. The probe was launched into low-Earth orbit on June 11 to scan the heavens for gamma rays, the most energetic wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

A new map based on early results from the spacecraft formerly known as GLAST is revealing the probe’s potential for unraveling some of the most perplexing problems in astrophysics.

This high-energy radiation comes from a variety of distant and poorly understood cosmic sources, including neutron stars, supermassive black holes, and powerful events known as gamma ray bursts.

Jon Morse, NASA’s astrophysics division director said, “The new telescope will explore the most extreme environments in the universe,”.

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