The F.C.C was set to approve a merger between XM and Sirius and end a nearly 18-month review of a deal that would essentially create a monopoly in satellite radio.

At its annual conference for developers, the company announced Facebook Connect, a way that other Web sites can integrate parts of Facebook?s service.

Kevin Johnson?s exit comes as Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft?s chief executive, is shaking up top-level staff in a bid to improve Microsoft?s Internet search and ad business.

Xerox?s profit fell 19 percent, but matched Wall Street?s forecast, as the office-equipment maker was hurt by restructuring charges.

RadioShack reported higher-than-expected profit on a surprise increase in sales, but the electronics retailer said the economic environment continues to be challenging.

The online retailer Amazon.com reported that net income for the second quarter more than doubled on strong sales.

AT&T said its second-quarter earnings rose 30 percent, but its revenue missed analysts? estimates.

Under the terms of the agreement, Nokia can use all of Qualcomm?s patents in its mobile phones and network equipment, and in return it agreed not to use its patents against Qualcomm.

After years of false starts, a new industry selling motor fuel made from waste is getting a big push in the U.S., with the first commercial sales possible within months.

General Dynamics reported a 25 percent rise in quarterly profit on Wednesday, helped by strong sales of its combat systems and business jets.

Zimmer Holdings, the nation?s biggest producer of orthopedic devices, says it will suspend sales of an artificial hip component that some doctors have complained was failing at a high rate.

Telecommunication companies in the U.S. have to juggle the financial effect of customers dropping their landlines, and increased competition between wireless operators.

After seven months of testing, Google rolls out Knol, a service that has been described as a Wikipedia killer. Read about it on Wikipedia.

Sugar Inc., the women?s blog network, has ended its advertising partnership with NBC Universal and taken its ad sales in-house. That leaves a gap in NBC?s women?s blog network.

Despite reassurances that he is cancer free four years after he was treated for pancreatic cancer, analysts are worried that Steven P. Jobs might be sick again.

EMC, the world?s biggest maker of corporate storage equipment, posted higher profit as international sales grew 27 percent and U.S. sales rose 10 percent.

Yahoo said that its revenue in the second quarter grew a sluggish 6 percent from the same period a year earlier as profits fell.

European venture capital firm Wellington Partners has opened a Silicon Valley office to help its investors and entrepreneurs bridge the cultural divide.

E*Trade posted a net loss of $94.6 million, or 19 cents a share, in contrast to a profit of $159.1 million, or 37 cents a share, a year earlier.

Vodafone, the world?s largest cellphone operator, said it was cutting its revenue forecast for the year to around $79.6 billion, the lower end of its previous estimate.

The nation?s largest discount brokerage Charles Schwab said that it had appointed Walter W. Bettinger II as president and chief executive, to succeed its founder.

The company said that its second-quarter net income rose 30 percent from the same period a year earlier while inkjet printer sales fell 49 percent.

The two companies want to turn the television remote control into a tool for buying the products being advertised and promoted on commercials and talk shows.

Yahoo?s board and management earned a reprieve after a weekend deal ended a bruising and acrimonious fight for control of the company with Carl C. Icahn.

As travel costs rise and airlines cut back service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting -- and business travel as well.

Apple, the third-largest personal computer maker in the United States, continued to benefit from the significant market share gains of its Macintosh computer line.

The chipmaker posted lower quarterly profit and revenue as growth in analog chips was offset by weakness in its wireless chip business.

Would-be innovators can sign up online to compete for prizes for solving diverse problems from around the world in a variety of disciplines.

Brocade said the deal was more about growth than cost savings, and that it would provide a broader range of networking technologies to support increasing Web traffic.

Microsoft is said to be starting an expensive campaign to reassure consumers that its Vista operating system isn?t all that bad.

Just Posted! Our review of the Canon EOS Rebel XS / EOS 1000D. The latest entry-level DSLR from Canon has a lot to live up to and some fierce competition to face so can the baby Rebel make as big an impact on the market as its forebears. And, more importantly, does it deserve to? Read our in-depth review to find out.

Panasonic has today announced the Lumix DMC-FZ28. The new camera is the successor to the popular FZ18 and comes with a slightly increased resolution (10.1 vs 8.0 MP) and all the zoom range you could ever need (27-486mm, 35mm equivalent). However, if that's still not enough there is also an optional 1.7x tele converter available. The Lumix DMC-FZ28 will be available in the UK from August for £329.99.

Panasonic has today announced the Lumix DMC-FX 150. The new camera offers a whopping 14.7 megapixels effective resolution which makes it (together with the Samsung NV100HD/TL34HD) the currently highest resolving compact camera on the market. Other features include Panasonic's new Venus IV imaging processor, a 28-100mm (35mm equivalent) zoom lens and not one but two baby modes! The Lumix DMC-FX150 will be available in the UK from August for £299.99.

Panasonic has today announced the Lumix DMC-LX3. The camera is aimed at DSLR users who are looking for a compact camera to complement their existing SLR gear. Consequently the LX3 comes with comprehensive manual controls and a fast F2.0-F2.8 24-60mm (35mm equivalent) Leica DC Vario-Summicron lens. Images are captured on a 1/1.63-inch CCD sensor sporting 10.1 million effective pixels. The Lumix DMC-LX3 will be available in the UK from August for £399.99.

Panasonic has today announced the successor to the FX35 digital compact camera - the FX37. The new model comes with Panasonic's Venus IV imaging processor and an enhanced Intelligent Auto mode which is now capable of tracking an object once the AF has locked onto it. All this fancy new technology has been built around a 10.1 MP sensor and a 25mm (35mm equivalent), 5x zoom lens. The Lumix DMC-FX37 will be available in the UK from August for £249.99.

Just Posted! Our review of the Sony Alpha 200. The simplified version of the ambitious A350, the A200 does without Sony's clever live view system but comes instead with a very competitive price tag. The result is a more conventional DSLR that boasts a feature set almost the equal of the older A100 at a fraction of the cost. So is this enough to make it the ideal DSLR for users looking to upgrade from their compact digital cameras? Read our full review to find out.

Just posted! Our new lens review of Sigma's latest iteration of its popular fast telezoom, the snappily-entitled 70-200mm 1:2.8 EX DG Macro HSM II. Offering fast and silent autofocus to users of all brands of DSLR via its HyperSonic Motor (HSM) autofocus, and with a closest focus distance of just 1m, this certainly looks like a strong contender on paper, but with a parent design dating back to 1999, how does it match up to the current state of the art?

Samsung has announced the NV100HD (Known as the TL34HD in the US), which it describes as "The World's highest 14.7 megapixel 28mm Wide angle lens digital camera." And even without the qualifiers, that's an awful lot of pixels. More impressively, it can record 720p HD video and incorporates a high-resolution, 460K dot, touch screen. It also features optical image stabilization alongside Samsung's digital stabilization system and many of the company's other image processing features.

Samsung's distinctive NV range gets another member with the announcement of the NV9 (TL9 in North America). It's got a 5x optical zoom, 10.2 megapixel sensor and the ability to play MP3 music files. It also contains all sorts of metering and image processing cleverness to help optimise photographs of social situations, with tricks and tweaks to help ensure well-exposed, smiley faces with smooth skin and open eyes. There are even fuel-gauge-style indicators for battery life and memory card space on the top of the camera that we think will polarize opinion into either 'cool' or 'entertaining'.

Samsung has announced the L310W (Known as the SL310W in the US), a 13.6 megapixel camera with a 28mm equivalent wide angle lens. The camera includes all sorts of features to help take photographs of friends and family, and an Auto Contrast Balance feature to boost dark area of back-lit scenes.

As part of Samsung's new model onslaught, it has released the S1070. The S1070 is a compact camera with a 3x optical zoom and what the company describes as a "premium quality" 10.2 megapixel sensor. A large 2.7" LCD screen, face-detection mode and 10 scene modes are provided to help capture and review the best possible images.

Samsung has announced the L201 (SL201 in the US), a 10.2 megapixel compact camera. It has Samsung's Auto Contrast Balance feature to brighten dark areas in high-contrast and back-lit scenes. It also has the potentially handy ability to charge batteries, in-camera. Photography purists will be able to buy the camera in black or silver, while more adventurous purchasers can splash out on the pink, turquoise or lime green versions.

Kodak has announced the creation of a new medium format 50MP chip, to be used in the newly-unveiled Hasselblad H3DII-50. The KAF-50100 Image Sensor offers a sensitivity range of ISO 50 - 400 and the highest resolution currently available in the 36 x 48mm format. The company spoke to us to explain the chip and the technologies behind it.

Engineers at Swedish medium format specialist Hasselblad have cooked-up the highest resolution 48 x 36 mm camera: the H3DII-50. The company has announced its intention to produce a 645 format sensor. Continuing the company's long history of collaboration with Kodak, the new camera is based around the US company's new 50MP sensor. The new body is also designed to accomodate the company's HTS 1.5 Tilt/Shift cradle that allows traditional lenses to be tilted and shifted.

Canon USA has announced the EOS Rebel XS, launched in other markets as the EOS 1000D on June 10th. In the United States, the camera will be available in a choice of black or silver but will not be available as body-only, with all units coming bundled with the EF-S 18-55mm IS lens. Canon has also announced its plans to build its first new Japanese camera factory for over a quarter of a century.

We've added some new information to our product database to make it easier to understand the characteristics of camera sensors. The idea of megapixels is generally well understood but, mainly because of the way they've historically been presented, sensor sizes aren't. We feel that relating these two pieces of information gives a clearer understanding of how they interact. To achieve this, we've added the new field: "Pixel Density" to our database, to help when comparing cameras. We think you'll find it useful.

In addition to the announcement of the D700, Nikon has revised the firmware of the D3 and D300. The latest D3 firmware adds new function button customization options though not the ones featured on the D700. In addition to these and a virtual horizon in live view mode, Nikon has also addressed the problem that some users experienced in which the battery indicator would incorrectly register an empty battery. This problem, which has come to be known as 'Dead Battery Syndrome,' has also been addressed in new firmware for the D300.

Perhaps the worst kept secret of any recent announcement Nikon has now officially revealed the compact, professional, twelve megapixel, full-frame (FX format) Nikon D700. From the outside the D700 is virtually identical to the D300, albeit for its larger 'full frame' viewfinder, internally it's almost identical to the D3, except for a slightly slower shutter (five frames per second up to eight frames per second with the MB-D10 battery grip). By comparison it also includes several function improvements over the D3 including Image Sensor cleaning ('sensor shake'), more flexible 'hard button' programming, virtual horizon in Live View and different DX mode indication on the focusing screen. The D700 also becomes the first professional Nikon DSLR to sport a built-in flash. As far as competition is concerned the D700 really only faces the Canon EOS 5D (and any replacement that may be in the works). On sale in July for US$2999 or €2599 body only. We've had a D700 for a few days now, just enough time to produce a detailed hands-on preview.

Nikon has confirmed two tilt and shift (also known as perspective correction) lenses we first heard of in January this year. There is the 'normal focal length' PC-E Micro Nikkor 45 mm F2.8D ED and 'medium telephoto' PC-E Micro Nikkor 85 mm F2.8D, both of which provide ±8.5° tilt, ±11.5mm shift and 90° axial (rotation) movement and also have the much touted 'Nano Crystal Coat'. When used on the D3, D300 (and we presume D700) these lenses also provide automatic aperture control as well as manual override using the aperture ring on the lens.

Nikon has today announced its new top-of-the-range flashgun - the Speedlight SB-900. The new model features a Multi-step auto zoom covering a 17-200mm zoom range, three illumination patterns (standard, center-weighted and even) and automatically detects if you are using the Nikon FX or DX format. The SB-900 will be available from the 25th of July.

Just posted: our in-depth review of the Pentax K20D. The K20D is a fully-featured semi-pro DSLR available for the cost of some of the latest, upper-entry-level digital cameras. It adds a handful of features and tweaks to the highly-respected K10D and attempts to address some of its shortcomings whilst also incorporating a colossal 14.6 million photosites on a sensor co-developed with Samsung. Is this enough, given the quality of some of the competitors?

Ricoh has today announced the GX200 digital compact camera. The new model is replacing the GX100 and inherits the old model's 24 to 72 mm (equiv.) lens, manual controls and a removable (optional) tilting electronic viewfinder. Resolution has been increased to 12 megapixels, the screen now measures 2.7 inches and the camera is controlled by the latest version of Ricoh's imaging processor - the Smooth Imaging Engine III. The GX200 will be available in the UK from the beginning of July.

Just Posted: Our review of the Olympus E-420. The E-420 was launched exactly one year after its predecessor, the E-410, and comes with only a relatively small number of modifications such a larger screen, contrast detect autofocus in live view and the Auto Gradation feature that we've first seen on the E3. It's the smallest SLR on the market but can it compete with the larger and more expensive models from the competition? Find out after the link...

Just posted! Our new lens review of Olympus's dinky little Zuiko Digital 25mm F2.8 Pancake. As an accompaniment to our E-420 review (and a welcome change from yet another 70-200mm F2.8), we examine the credentials of the only fixed focal length lens currently bundled as a kit with a DSLR. It's certainly an attractively tiny package in combination with the E-420, but is it actually any good?

Sony has announced the new HVL-F58AM flagship flash unit. The new model replaces the former HVL-F56AM model, and features a new Quick Shift Bounce system. The flash head can pivot 90 degrees left and right on a horizontal axis in addition to the conventional up and down. It offers a higher degree of flexibility for external lighting control and is compatible will all existing models as well as Sony's upcoming flagship camera that will be unveiled later this year.

Having recently been provided with updated firmware, we have been able to restart our postponed Pentax K20D review. To tide you over while we're tinkering away in the studio, here's a full preview of Pentax's flagship DSLR. So what does the K20D offer, beyond that 14.6 megapixel Pentax/Samsung sensor?

Just posted! Our new lens review of Tamron's latest baby, the SP AF 70-200mm F2.8 Di LD (IF) Macro. In the third of our epic four-part series of telezoom reviews, we take a look through the viewfinder using a lens said to inherit its 'product concept' from Tamron's highly regarded 28-75mm F2.8. So does this young pretender really inherit the same compelling mixture of fine optics at a bargain price, and provide a challenge to the camera manufacturers' own fast telephoto zooms?  

Pentax has just released updated firmware for its K20D DSLR. The update, which takes the camera to version 1.01, addresses the problem characterized on the DPReview forums in which 'hot' pixels could appear when the 2-second self times was used.

Olympus has issued updated firmware for its flagship DSLR, the E3. The latest firmware, V1.2, makes an update to improve the consistency of the camera's auto white balance. As usual, owners can download this latest update through Olympus's Master or Studio software.

Just posted: Early samples gallery from the new Canon EOS 1000D / Digital Rebel XS. Canon's new entry-level DSLR has generated a lot of interest, racing to the top of our most-clicked-on cameras list, so we've gone out and shot a samples gallery to give you some idea of what to expect. We must stress, however, that these are beta-standard images from a pre-production camera.

Working from home as a freelance contractor or remote employee can be a great thing, particularly if you live alone. But what if you have a spouse and/or children at home with you while you work? Every work environment offers distractions, but those who work from home with their families face a unique set of issues?and need equally unique ways of dealing with them.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Tell us how you overcome isolation, distractions, and temptation. How you deal with kids and deadlines. How you walk the blurry line between work and home. Share your best practices on working from home so we can present them in an upcoming issue of A List Apart.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

We've already got a great lineup of speakers for the Business of Software conference:

• Seth Godin
• Eric Sink
• Steve Johnson
• Richard Stallman
• Paul Kenny
• Tom Jennings
• Dharmesh Shah
• Mike Milinkovich
• Jessica Livingston
• Jason Fried
• and me!

Neil Davidson was looking for a way to bring in a handful of extra interesting speakers for very brief presentations just to keep the conference more dynamic and hear from different corners of the world. I had recently read about Pecha Kucha. The speaker gets 6 minutes and 40 seconds: no more, no less. You submit exactly 20 slides. Each one is shown for exactly 20 seconds and then flips automatically. At the end, even if you're almost done and just have one more thing, the mic cuts off and you sit down.

It sounded like a good idea. Speakers have to plan very carefully and rehearse repeatedly to make sure their speech is going to synchronize correctly with the slides, which makes for a more polished speech. They have to edit mercilessly to boil their subject matter down to 400 seconds, which makes it more interesting and dynamic. And if they suck, well, you don't have to wait very long for them to go away!

45 people submitted applications to speak. There were a lot of terrific applications. Somehow, Neil and I narrowed it down to 8 very impressive finalists who will speak in Boston. I can't wait!

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Here at Fog Creek Software we get a lot of requests for a tour of the office, which we usually have to decline: we have this unusual obsession with giving programmers quiet working conditions.

But once a year, we do have an open house. It's a rare chance to peek behind the curtains and meet the people behind FogBugz and Copilot.

This year, we're only a month or so away from moving (to a much larger space downtown) but we didn't want to skip the annual tradition, so the open house will be held anyway at the old office:

Thursday, July 17
5:00 - 7:00 pm

535 8th Ave. (cross street: 37th)
18th Floor
New York, NY 10018

You'll get a chance to meet the Dingos (class of '08 interns), the SMTPs, our new sales department, the developers behind FogBugz, Copilot, and Wasabi, and the rest of the team. Some kind of food-like snack will be served. Tiny cheddar-cheese-flavored crackers in the shape of fish, maybe. Don't skip lunch.

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A long time ago, it became fashionable, even recommended, to disable menu items when they could not be used.

Don't do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there's some reason you can't complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

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A reader wrote in to ask what kind of desks we're going to be using for the new office.

The ergonomics experts always want you to have your feet flat on the floor. So you have to adjust your seat height first. Then, your arms are supposed to be horizontal while you're typing. This means you need an adjustable-height keyboard.

Most of the adjustable height keyboard trays are extremely annoying... they're floppy, flimsy, and limit the keyboard to one location. Therefore we decided to get desks where the entire worksurface can be raised and lowered.

Finally, a lot people praise the benefits of standing up for a part of the day, even if you spend the whole day at a computer, so we wanted desks where the worksurface could rise all the way to "counter height" so you could stand and work. And if you are going to be standing up and sitting down it's best to have a desk with a pushbutton, electric motor so you don't get lazy about doing it.

Eventually we settled on the Details adjusTables Series 7. We didn't like the desk surface that those came with (with rounded corners and a chubby profile, it's just too blah) so we ordered a custom desk surface from Steelcase with something called a knife edge profile. That makes the desk look paper-thin:

 

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Yes! I'm still doing those weekly podcasts with Jeff. We've already done eight of them.

We're moving, though, to IT Conversations, a huge network of terrific audio shows about technology. Just looking at all the great shows they have there makes me feel a bit like a kid in jeans and a T-shirt with a dirty slogan who just walked into Chez Panisse.

The new feed, IT Conversations-based feed is at http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/series/stackoverflow.xml.

The easy way to subscribe is with ITunes, choose Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast, paste that URL in there, and you'll be all set.

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“We lost some time because a deal to expand at our current location fell through -- it turned out that the extra floor we wanted wasn’t actually, to use the real estate jargon, ‘available.’”

From Adventures in Office Space, my latest column in Inc. Magazine.

P.S.! Neil reminds me that you've only got until the end of the week to register for the Business of Software conference at the low early rate ($1395 instead of $1795).

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It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft's bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that "Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control."

What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.

I tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented Hailstorm: architecture astronauts. "That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization.

Follow the story, here. I started picking on one company that appeared to be particularly astronautish: Groove, which was trying to rebuild Lotus Notes (a giant synchronization machine) in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn't make much of a ripple outside that niche. Their real success was in getting bought by Microsoft, which brought Groove's designer and chief architecture-astronaut Ray Ozzie to the role of "Chief Software Architect" at Microsoft, supposedly the technical guy that would keep inventing the future after BillG left so that Steve Ballmer would have some new territory on which to build his next illegal monopoly.

And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."

What's Microsoft Live Mesh?

Hmm, let's see.

"Imagine all your devices?PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones?working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."

Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It's a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.

How on earth does Microsoft continue to pour massive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. I'll bet you've never even heard of it. The 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I'm so excited I might just die.

I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

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Everything looks better in black-and-white.

The Fix

Put the city in your rear view mirror

Eating your way to better pictures.

To capture movement sharply, go stroboscopic.

Vodafone Group plc stock dived more than 13% in Tuesday trades as telecommunications and high-tech stocks veered sharply lower after a spate of weak quarterly results or soft forecasts.

Alcatel-Lucent today announced it has been selected by Suo Cable Net, a Japanese cable-TV operator, to design, integrate and deploy a Gigabit Passive Optical Network solution. This new network, which will enable Suo Cable Net to begin rolling out high-speed Internet and video services this month, will be the first commercial GPON deployment in Japan.

A Swedish-Indian start-up developed equipment to let telecom companies extend mobile service into developing nations.

Brocade shares jump after the $3 billion deal is announced.

Strong design-win activity and a solid pipeline indicate significant sales growth towards the end of the fiscal year and in fiscal 2009.

Shares of Sprint Nextel Corp gained more than 3% and Alcatel-Lucent rose 2.8% to lead telecommunications stocks Friday in narrowly mixed trading.

Shares of Adtran Inc. and ADC Telecommunications Inc. fell sharply after brokerage downgrades and Sprint Nextel Corp. also subsided after takeover talk died down, but the the majority of telecommunications stocks actually advanced in Wednesday trades.

Shares of Adtran Inc. and ADC Telecommunications Inc. both fell more than 5% after Credit Suisse downgraded the two network-equipment makers, while Sprint Nextel Corp. dropped 3.5% after takeover speculation that boosted the stock on Tuesday died down.

The networking equipment maker also declared a second-quarter dividend of 9 cents.

VIENNA, Va.----LGS, a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent dedicated to serving the U.S. government community, announced today it had completed a video conference upgrade project for Redstone Arsenal located in northern Alabama.

Dip into chips. Gadget of the Week: Pure Digital Flip Mino