Google
 

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

InFocus' losses shrink, but future remains uncertain

by Mike Rogoway July 31, 2007 10:30AM

InFocus Corp. reported its smallest loss in more than two years this morning, the first quarterly earnings report since a dissident shareholder took control of the Wilsonville company and InFocus removed its chief executive. But the struggling digital projector maker remains in limbo, with its top leadership positions unfilled as InFocus searches for strategic direction.

Second-quarter sales totaled $73.6 million, down from $97.7 million in the second quarter a year ago. InFocus lost $7.8 million, or 20 cents a share. That compared to a $12.8 million loss, 32 cents a share, in the second quarter last year.

InFocus' top two executive positions are both vacant. CEO Kyle Ranson quit in May and his position is open while InFocus searches for a replacement; Chief Financial Officer Roger Rowe quit at the beginning of July and his job is being filled on an in interim basis by a corporate consultant.

New York investment firm Caxton Associates, a major InFocus shareholder that had been highly critical of its leadership, reached a deal to take control of the company's board in June. Before taking over, Caxton had suggested that InFocus should consider winding down or selling its operations and focus on licensing its technology.

This morning, InFocus' interim leadership said only that it wants to increase sales and continue cutting costs. On a conference call with investors and financial analysts this morning, executives said they were not familiar enough with InFocus operations to discuss them in detail. They declined comment on strategic options the company is considering.

At 10:30 this morning, InFocus' share price was down 5 cents to $2.13 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Britney’s new hobby: Pole dancing

By Jeannette Walls
MSNBC
Updated: 12:04 a.m. PT Dec 12, 2006

Now Britney Spears is stripping.

The panty-eschewing singer has been pole-dancing with her new best friend, Paris Hilton, who has been giving her private striptease lessons, according to U.K. reports. The two have reportedly been practicing on a stripper pole in Hilton’s Hollywood house.

“Paris took Britney upstairs where she fitted her in a blue tutu, and then Paris put on a matching tutu,” a source told the London Star. “They then went downstairs and danced at Paris’ in-house stripper pole. Britney loves her new moves and can’t wait to get a fella and test them out.”

Meanwhile, Hilton has been spotted stroking Spears’ thigh, leading some to believe that they were planning a same-sex gesture at the Billboard Music Awards, but the two have since pulled out of hosting duties.

“Maybe they were going to reprise the stunt Britney and Madonna pulled,” says one source, referring to the smooch at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, “but they decided that it was so three years ago.”


Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Beyonce Falls Down Concert Steps During The Beyonce Experience

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles, an American R&B singer, songwriter, record producer, actress, dancer, fashion designer, and model rose to fame as the creative force and lead singer of R&B girl group Destiny's Child, the world's best-selling female group of all time

Beyonce is well into The Beyonce Experience tour - three weeks to be exact. She has a good reason to be tired, dehydrated and just a little dizzy - all that screaming and yelling takes a toll on a girl.

Last night at the Amway Arena in Orlando, Florida, Beyonce was ‘singing’ the opening lines of “Ring the Alarm” when she found herself face first into the steps of the concert stage.

Doubt you’ll find the video on her fan site, but cellphone cameras will never allow a moment like this to escape YouTube.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Paula Zahn Will Leave CNN
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: July 24, 2007

Paula Zahn is an American newscaster, most recently the host of Paula Zahn NOW on CNN. On July 24th, 2007, she resigned from CNN.

A day after CNN announced that it was hiring Campbell Brown to replace one of its prime-time hosts, presumably Paula Zahn, Ms. Zahn confirmed today that she was leaving the cable channel, effective Aug.

The unraveling of “Paula Zahn Now,” which made its debut at 8 p.m. in 2003, was ultimately a function of ratings. Though CNN took pains recently to note that the number of viewers for the show had ticked upward earlier this year, Ms. Zahn’s task remained a Herculean one.

The estimated 558,000 viewers her program has been drawing, on average, each weeknight this year, according to Nielsen Media Research, represents less than a quarter of the nearly 2.3 million who watch “The O’Reilly Factor” with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Ms. Zahn’s program also draws about 100,000 fewer viewers a night than “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.

In a telephone interview shortly after breaking the news of her departure to her staff, Ms. Zahn said the decision was a mutual one between her and CNN management. Her contract, she said, is up at year’s end.

“We worked so hard to maintain a high quality of objective reporting on the air,” she said of her show, which recently featured a series of special reports about intolerance, including racial bias. “Yet what has become clear when you look at the landscape, particularly in the 8 o’clock hour, it seems pretty obvious the audience is drawn to opinion-driven shows. That is not what I do.”

Ms. Zahn she had no idea what she would be doing next, beyond taking some time off.

For all the rumors in recent months of Ms. Zahn’s impending departure, the transition to Ms. Brown will not necessarily be an orderly one. Ms. Brown signed an exit agreement with NBC which keeps her off the air until Nov. 1, meaning CNN will have no regular host in its 8 p.m. timeslot for three months. (She is also expecting her first child in late December, and planning to take at least a few weeks maternity leave then.)

Once she makes her debut, Ms. Brown, like Ms. Zahn before her, will be asked to marshal all her experience on network news to try not only to surpass Mr. Olbermann but somehow to become competitive with Mr. O’Reilly.

Ms. Zahn’s awkward departure from CNN was a stark contrast to the swirl of excitement that had surrounded her arrival.

In 2001, Ms. Zahn was hosting a prime-time program on Fox News when her agent, Richard Leibner, succeeded in negotiating a new contract for her at its rival, CNN. Fox News responded by filing suit against Mr. Leibner, contending that he was not permitted to negotiate a new job for Ms. Zahn before she had left her old one. Though the suit was dismissed, the hot rhetoric lingered; Ms. Zahn’s former boss, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, said she was no more valuable to Fox than a “dead raccoon.”

Ms. Zahn, who also spent 10 years at CBS News, was hired by CNN to lead a new morning show. She was pressed into service earlier than planned to help lead CNN’s coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2003, after she (along with her then-co-host, Anderson Cooper) posted some gains in the morning, the network moved her to prime time.
Tedy Bruschi Dead?


Tedy Lacap Bruschi (born June 9, 1973 in San Francisco, California) is an American football linebacker for the New England Patriots of the National Football League. He is of Filipino and Italian descent.



Talk about some crazy rumors. The Web world was abuzz Tuesday night with news that Tedy Bruschi of the New England Patriots was dead, that he had committed suicide. The good news: Teddy Bruschi is alive and kicking. Well, maybe not kicking since he is a linebacker.

Tedy's agent, Brad Blank, confirms that Tedy is still, very much, ALIVE.

Tom Curran of NBC News also confirmed the rumors to be false.

"How did it (the rumor) get this far? Well, the answer won't really drape the journalism industry in glory.

Apparently, an anonymous e-mail to the Fox affiliate in Boston came in Monday afternoon saying that Bruschi had gone to Jesus.

The smart move would have been to try and confirm with the Patriots. Instead, the reporter who took the e-mail tried to confirm with three other media members which put them all on red alert and caused them to start calling every contact they could to find out if tragedy had struck Bruschi and the Patriots again.

The rumor mill has continued churning through the day on Tuesday.

Bruschi, who suffered a stroke after the 2004 season, has been tremendous with the media throughout his career but abhors having his privacy invaded by the media. This episode, which he is aware of, is not going to be a hit with him."
Kryptos

Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist James Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, in the United States. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. It continues to provide a diversion for employees of the CIA and other cryptanalysts attempting to decrypt the messages.


Description

The main sculpture is made of red granite, red and green slate, white quartz, petrified wood, lodestone and copper, and is located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard, outside of the Agency cafeteria.

The name Kryptos comes from the Greek word for "hidden", and the theme of the sculpture is "intelligence gathering." The most prominent feature is a large vertical S-shaped copper screen resembling a scroll, or piece of paper emerging from a computer printer, covered with characters comprising encrypted text. The characters consist of the 26 letters of the standard alphabet and question marks cut out of the copper. This "inscription" contains four separate enigmatic messages, each apparently encrypted with a different cipher.

At the same time as the main sculpture was installed, sculptor Sanborn also placed several other pieces around CIA grounds, such as several large granite slabs with sandwiched copper sheets outside the entrance to the New Headquarters Building. Several morse code messages are engraved in the copper, and one of the slabs has an engraved compass rose. Other elements of Sanborn's installation include a landscaped area, a duck pond, and several other seemingly unmarked slabs.

Encrypted messages

The ciphertext on one half of the main sculpture contains 865 characters in total. The other half of the sculpture comprises a Vigenère encryption tableau. Sanborn worked with a retiring CIA employee named Ed Scheidt, Chairman of the CIA Cryptographic Center, to come up with the cryptographic systems used on the sculpture. Sanborn has since revealed that the sculpture contains a riddle within a riddle which will be solvable only after the four encrypted passages have been decrypted. He said that he gave the complete solution at the time of the sculpture's dedication to CIA director William H. Webster. However, in an interview for wired.com in January 2005, Sanborn said that he had not given Webster the entire solution. He did, however, confirm that where in part 2 it says "Who knows the exact location? Only WW," that "WW" was intended to refer to William Webster.

Solvers

The first person to publicly announce solving the first three sections, in 1999, was James Gillogly, a computer scientist from southern California, who deciphered 768 of the characters. The portion that he couldn't solve, the remaining 97 or 98 characters, is the same part which has stumped the government's own cryptanalysts. After Gillogly's announcement, the CIA revealed that their analyst David Stein had also solved the same sections in 1998, using pencil and paper techniques, though at the time of his solution the information was only disseminated within the intelligence community, and no public announcement was made. The NSA also claimed at that time that they had solvers, but would not reveal names or dates until 2005, when it was learned that an NSA team led by Ken Miller, along with Dennis McDaniels and two other unnamed individuals, had solved parts 1-3 using a computer in late 1992, but that they too had been stumped by the fourth section.

2006 clarification

On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted the Kryptos Group (an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle) to inform them that the accepted solution to part 2 was wrong. He had removed a single character from the ciphertext for aesthetic reasons. An accidental result of this change was that plaintext that should have decoded as "XLAYERTWO" had been decoded as "IDBYROWS".

The impact of this change on attempts to solve part 4 is not currently known. Sanborn has implied that there may be a connection, as solvers "were in fact, missing a clue".

Related sculptures

Kryptos is the first cryptographic sculpture made by Sanborn. After Kryptos, however, he went on to make several other sculptures with codes and other types of writing, including one called Antipodes which is at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., an "Untitled Kryptos Piece" which was sold to a private collector, and a Cyrillic Projector with encrypted Russian text, which included an extract from a classified KGB document. The cipher on one side of Antipodes repeats the text from CIA's Kryptos. The cipher on its Russian side is duplicated on the Cyrillic Projector. The Russian portion of the cipher on the Cyrillic Projector and Antipodes was solved in 2003 via an international effort organized by Elonka Dunin, with the cryptographic component independently cracked by Frank Corr and Mike Bales.

Pop culture references

The dust jacket of the US version of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code contains two references to Kryptos: One on the back cover (coordinates printed light red on dark red, vertically next to the blurbs) is a reference to the coordinates mentioned in the plaintext of part 2 (see below), except the degrees digit is off by one. When Brown and his publisher were asked about this, they both gave the same reply: "The discrepancy is intentional." The other reference is hidden in the brown "tear" artwork—upside-down words which say "Only WW knows." These are another reference to Kryptos Part 2.

A small version of the Kryptos appears in the season 5 episode of Alias, "S.O.S.". In it, Marshall Flinkman, in a small moment of comic relief, says he has cracked the code just by looking at it during a tour visit to the Central Intelligence Agency office. The solution he describes sounds like the solution to the first two parts.

Solutions

The following are the solutions of parts 1-3 of the sculpture.Misspellings present in the code are included as-is. Kryptos K1 and K2 ciphers are polyalphabetic substitution, using a Vigenere Tableau similar to the tableau on the other half of the sculpture. K3 is a transposition cipher, and K4 is yet unsolved.

Solution 1

Keywords: Kryptos, Palimpsest

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

Solution 2

Keywords: Kryptos, Abscissa

IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

In April 2006 Sanborn said that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an "X" used to indicate a break for aesthetic reasons, and that the decrypted text which ended "...FOUR SECONDS WEST ID BY ROW S" should actually be "...FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO".

Note:The coordinates mentioned in the plaintext: 38°57′6.5″N, 77°8′44″W; on Google Maps; analysis of the cited location. The point is about 200 feet south of the sculpture itself.

Solution 3

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q

This is a paraphrased and misspelled quotation from Howard Carter's account of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun in his 1923 book The Tomb of Tutankhamun. The question with which it ends is that posed by Lord Carnarvon, to which Carter (in the book) famously replied "wonderful things". In the actual November 26, 1922 field notes, his reply was, "Yes, it is wonderful.

Solution 4

Part 4 remains publicly unsolved, though there is an active Yahoo! Group (formed in 2003) which continues to coordinate actions of 1000+ members towards final resolution. Most likely, the answer is the sentence spoken by Howard Carter in response to Lord Carnarvon's question in his book: "'Yes,' I told Carnarvon, 'I see wonderful things.'"




Chinese "elephant man" to go under the knife
Mon Jul 23, 2007 10:39AM EDT

BEIJING (Reuters Life!) - A Chinese "elephant man" with a crippling 15 kg (33 lb) tumor drooping from his head and face -- the biggest on record -- undergoes life-threatening surgery on Tuesday to have it removed.

Huang Chuncai, 31, from the southern province of Hunan, can hardly speak because the mass is so huge, he has to cradle it when he stands. His left eye is totally covered, his left ear hangs to his shoulder, and his right ear and jaw have been engulfed.

He recently visited his hometown to see relatives before the operation.

"Because I am going to have surgery, I am afraid of how everything will turn out," he said. "I came back to see my parents one more time."

Huang's face and head swelled when he was a child and, according to a neighbor, his mother said he should be a government official when he grew up because his head was so big.

"His head got bigger and bigger each year," said neighbor Huang Bamei, who shares the same name.

The fleshy tumor is about 57 cm (22.4 inches) long and has a 97 cm (38 inches) perimeter at its end; Huang stands 135 cm (4 ft 5 inches) high, records from a hospital in the city of Guangzhou said.

He lost his teeth at the age of 25, it said, and his backbone became malformed because of the weight.

As Huang left home for hospital, his tearful mother waved goodbye and said she hoped he would be able to live a normal life after surgery.

"I am holding his hand, patting his head, and he told me: 'Don't cry mother. I should get better. Everything that can be cured, will be cured.' I love him a lot," said Huang's mother, He Baohua.

Neurofibromatosis is a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of neural cell tissues, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

An ultrasound of Huang's tumor showed it was full of blood vessels, and the hospital said if doctors performing the surgery become unable to staunch hemorrhaging for any reason he could potentially suffer fatal blood loss in two minutes.

The disorders cause tumors to grow on nerves and produce other abnormalities such as skin changes and bone deformities. Although many affected persons inherit the disorder, between 30 and 50 percent of new cases arise spontaneously.

Current treatments are aimed at controlling symptoms. Surgery can help some bone malformations and remove painful or disfiguring tumors, but they could grow back in greater numbers.


Lindsay Lohan Mug Shot

Actress, 21, nabbed in Santa Monica on drunk driving, cocaine charges. Here's the mug shot Lindsay Lohan posed for this morning following her arrest in Santa Monica for drunk driving and cocaine possession. The actress, 21, was nabbed after cops spotted her SUV chasing another vehicle at high speed. After Lohan failed a field sobriety test, she was transported to the L.A. county lockup, where a pat down search turned up cocaine in her pants pocket. Click here to see the Santa Monica Police Department's booking sheet for Lindsay Dee Lohan, accused felon. Last July, Lohan's hard-partying ways left a Hollywood studio boss so perturbed that he sent a blistering letter to the starlet warning that her "discourteous, irresponsible and unprofessional" behavior was jeopardizing the movie "Georgia Rule."
Missing pages make Harry Potter a real cliffhanger
Louise Dickson, Times Colonist
Published: Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had Tessa Siegel in its grip.

Then something went horribly wrong. The book seemed to be repeating itself. Was Harry having a flashback? Siegel wondered.

"I skimmed over two or three pages," the 32-year-old massage therapist said Monday. "Then I started to get a little bit irritated, because the author only has 600 pages to tie up a whole seven years of Harry's life, and I wondered why she was wasting it. That's when I started looking and realized there was some obvious misprint, some flaw in the book."

Siegel's copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowlings's seventh and final novel in the series, went from page 352 back to page 289, then from page 289 to page 320. She is missing pages 353 to 384.

According to Raincoast Books spokesman Jamie Broadhurst, such misprints happen, albeit rarely.

"In any print run, there is sometimes a minuscule amount where there is a printing error for some reason," said Broadhurst. "It happens at the bindery, whether they've printed a signature upside down or the print has faded or the book has gone out without a dust jacket. ... It's not common, but in any print run, there's potential for this."

Broadhurst suggested Siegel return the book quickly for an exchange.

In fact, Siegel had already tried to exchange it, but Bolen Books, where she had pre-ordered the copy, had sold out - just three days after the book was released. So, she was off to find a new copy.

"I want to read the ending before somebody lets it slip," an anxious Siegel said on her way to the car. "The truth, I'm hoping for a Disney ending where Harry Potter doesn't die. Beyond that, I'm not too concerned."

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=2332c6ca-a7f7-4a80-8282-31e366daaea2&k=45748