Nacchio’s lawyer argued that he was upbeat about the company’s prospects during this period because he knew of impending lucrative, secret contracts with the government. The judge in the trial barred some parts of the classified defense, and the issue was barely discussed in the trial.

Qwest Communications’ former Chief Executive Joseph Nacchio, who was sentenced last summer to six years in prison for insider trading, is getting a new trial.

Nacchio, who served as the phone company’s CEO from 1997 until 2002, was convicted in April last year on 19 of 42 counts of insider trading. Prosecutors said that Nacchio had profited from selling $101 million worth of Qwest shares after company insiders had told him the company could not meet financial targets. In July, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison. He was fined $19 million and ordered to forfeit $52 million.

Nacchio appealed his conviction in October. And his lawyers argued that what he knew about the company’s finances when he sold his stock wasn’t “material” information that required disclosure to investors. According to one of Nacchio’s lawyers, the judge limited the testimony of an expert witness and also rejected classified evidence that was important in Nacchio’s defense.

On Monday, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the 19 guilty verdicts and ordered a new trial for Nacchio stating that the trial judge had improperly limited testimony from an expert witness and excluded classified evidence, which could have been used in Nacchio’s defense.

The bigger issue is that Apple came out with some great new machines that don’t provide nearly enough options.

(Credit: Apple)

Link to CNET coverage: Apple polishes up its MacBook line
Link to MacWorld: Matte Matters

Disclaimer: I am an Apple fanboy.

Feel free to flame me, but I am not wrong about this.

I got a new MacBook Pro about a month ago but was considering giving it to my father and grabbing one of the new ones when they are in stores tomorrow. However, the lack of matte screen really bums me out. In fact, it’s the reason why I won’t go buy one for awhile despite liking the new features and form factor.

The glossy screen does present a great image provided you are sitting in a place that allows you to position your machine accordingly. Otherwise it can get really annoying. And for those of us who wear glasses when sitting at our computers, we know that anti-glare lenses only go so far.

Why no matte screen?

The glossy-only screen highlights the problems consumers face when one vendor controls everything. At least if there were Apple licensees, someone else could solve that problem. And don’t give me the story about after-market screens. That defeats the design of the machine and never works as well.

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to pull its support of a $1.8 billion project to build a power plant that captures pollution underground, according to published reports.

Separately, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce speech on Tuesday that President Bush’s budget proposal next week “will start to deal with” tariffs on imported ethanol. “I think this industry is pretty close to being able to stand on its own,” he was quoted as saying.

Carbon capture and storage is considered an important technology to reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions, but the technology is unproven at a large scale. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year called for government funding of carbon capture projects in the United States to work out technical issues.

But ballooning costs and a dispute over the location prompted the Department of Energy to pull its support, according to an Associated Press article citing lawmakers who were briefed by the agency. An announcement is expected in the coming days.

In December, the FuturGen Alliance, which includes participation of oil and coal companies, announced plans to build its first facility in Matoon, Ill.

The FutureGen project is meant to test cutting-edge carbon capture and storage technology, which is supposed to dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants.

Michael Gartenberg rightly notes that the important thing coming out of Monday isn’t going to be hardware, it’s going to be the
iPhone as a platform for development. The horny one may have prematurely poo-pooed (and we all know how unfortunate prematurely poo-pooing can be) the impact of the iPhone on greasing Apple’s skids into the business market a few weeks ago. He’s since heard it really is opening doors that were previously shut.

So, the Macalope would not at all be surprised to see more details of Apple’s enterprise strategy revealed on Monday and it’s why he’s bullish on the “Snow Leopard” rumors. After all, there’s gold in them thar cubes.

Someone in Apple marketing deserves a gold star for advertising a free seminar on OS X Client Management on InfoWorld’s email newsletter.

“I’m done with Twitter,” he said, adding that he was feeling a bit overwhelmed. “I’ve been getting too much attention lately.”

Twitter said it has closed the hole that allowed the worm to spread.

Mooney said his site has has been live to the public for about two weeks and has 905 members, but that it “is growing quickly because of the worm.”

“I thought about it later and basically did it because I was bored,” he said. “And I didn’t think Twitter would fix (the flaw) very soon. But I didn’t think it would spread as far or as fast as it did.”

Brooklyn resident Michael “Mikeyy” Mooney, 17, told CNET News in an interview that he created the worm “out of boredom.”

Mooney, a high school senior who said one day he hopes to get a job as a security analyst, said he has been creating worms for about three years. He added that the worms he creates aren’t designed to do much damage but that this will likely be his last worm.

Updated at 7:40 p.m. PDT with more information from the worm’s creator.

However, Mooney said he released the second worm exploiting the original flaw Sunday morning, after Twitter claimed to have closed the holes. He also said that he had not yet been contacted by Twitter representatives.

“We’ve taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this ‘worm’ to spread,” Twitter said in a statement Saturday. “No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack.”

Much like Saturday’s StalkDaily worm, the “Mikeyy” worm posts unwanted messages to users’ pages. The “Mikeyy” worm began spreading on the micro-blogging site early Sunday, posting messages such as “Mikeyy I am done…,” “MikeyyMikeyy is done.,” and “Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy.”

The messages circulating Saturday promoted StalkDaily.com, a short-messaging site similar to Twitter. While initially denying any responsibility for the worm, StalkDaily.com posted a message saying, “I have came clean and have accepted the responsibility for the worm…”

Click here for more news on Windows 7.

Of course, users will be the ultimate judge of whether Microsoft meets this goal. It set out many of the same objectives with Vista.

On Monday, I had a chance to talk with Windows VP Mike Nash about Microsoft’s approach with
Windows 7. In addition to his comments for this article, I also did a brief video interview with him that is posted below.

“The focus is on making sure the things you do (today) are easier and that the things you always wanted to do are possible,” he said. “There’s a lot of work we’ve done to just make things easier and faster.”

Nash’s overall summary of Windows 7 was this:

Keep people from viewing the data hidden in Office docs
You may be sharing more information than you intend to when you send someone a Word document, Excel worksheet, or PowerPoint presentation. If two or more people have worked on the file, there’s a good chance that anyone who opens the file subsequently can view insertions and–more importantly–deletions made by each person, as well as any comments they may have made, and other personal information relating to the file’s creator. Microsoft’s Remove Hidden Data program for Office 2003 and XP will remove such data in a file before you share it. (See below for a description of Office 2007’s built-in Document Inspector, which functions similarly.)

Poll attendees to find the best time for a meeting
Everybody’s busy, as anyone who has ever tried to schedule a meeting with more than two attendees quickly learns. TimeBridge Personal Scheduling Manager is an Outlook add-in that lets you send e-mails to the attendees with as many as five proposed meeting times. They select the times they’re available or not, and they can even mark one of the times as “best.” Once all the people respond, the program sends you and the attendees an e-mail suggesting the best time, which it adds to your Outlook calendar. The program places a toolbar in Outlook 2003 and 2007, from which you can create a new meeting, view your scheduled meetings, and edit your account settings.

Microsoft Office is so jam-packed with features that an entire industry has been created to help people find the ones they need. (An example is Addintools’ $30 Classic Menu for Office 2007.) Why would anyone suggest that you add even more functions to Office apps? Because the best free Office add-ins can save you considerable time and trouble, without costing you a red cent. Here are five of my favorite Office helpers.

Office 2007 adds the Document Inspector that cleanses Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 of revisions, versions, presentation notes, hidden rows and columns, and other metadata, including personally identifiable information. To activate this feature, click the Office button and choose Prepare>Inspect Document>Inspect. After it runs, select Remove All as necessary.

Send text messages from Outlook
If you use Outlook 2003 or 2007 and you’re having a hard time keeping track of your text messages, why not let the program manage your SMS correspondence for you? The Microsoft Office SMS Add-in lets you treat each message like an e-mail: save drafts, view all sent items, forward them as e-mail or SMS, even spell-check messages before you send them. There are some restrictions, however: you can send messages to any phone on a GSM network, but you can’t retrieve messages from the phone, and the program does not support Flash SMS or the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).

After you download and install the program (and after Microsoft “validates” your copy of Office), you’ll find a Remove Hidden Data option on the File menu of your Office apps. You can also remove the hidden information from several files at once by running the program separately. Among the information the program removes are comments, revision marks, deleted text, user names, and macros.

Keep your secrets by running Office 2007's Document Inspector before sharing your files.

You have to register (name, e-mail address, and time zone) to send meeting invitations, but attendees need not sign up, though they can invite others, and add the meeting to their Outlook or Google Calendar. You can also network your calendars to see who’s available when prior to scheduling the meeting.

Tomorrow: For bullet-fast app launches, skip the menu and go straight to the command prompt.

Teach Excel some new tricks with ExTools
If you could create your own Excel toolbar, it would probably include a list of your favorite worksheets, a super-clipboard for storing text you reuse frequently, and the ability to save and back up a worksheet with one click. It may also let you switch a vertical range to horizontal (and vice versa) with a single click, reverse the order of a row of cells just as quickly, and save a selection as an Excel, text, HTML, or comma-delimited (CSV) file. You get all these features and more with ExTools, and its partner for Office 2007, ExTools RX.

View the responses of meeting attendees by clicking a link in the TimeBridge Outlook toolbar.

Propose as many as five different meeting times and let TimeBridge Personal Scheduling Manager poll attendees find the best one.

YouTube comes to PowerPoint
No matter how many fancy transitions, jumping graphics, animated lines of text, or “borrowed” comic strips you add to your PowerPoint slides, your audience will be sawing logs unless you provide them with content that matters. Shyam Pillai’s YouTube Video Wizard lets you insert a YouTube video in any version of PowerPoint from 97 to 2007 with just a few clicks. After you download and install the program, just click Insert>YouTube video, insert the video’s URL, choose to play it once or loop it, set the size and placement of the playback window in the slide, and then run your presentation. The video will be embedded in a slide, complete with Flash control. You must have a working Internet connection to run the video, and there’s not much you can do to embellish the slides they appear on, but now you can let lonelygirl15 help you get your message across.

The travel site’s CEO, Hugh Crean, also posted a brief blog on Farecast’s site announcing the sale to Microsoft, but adding few details.

Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it has acquired Seattle-based Farecast, a travel site that offers an engine predicting whether airfares for a given route are headed up or down.

“Farecast has been a partner of ours on MSN Travel and we look forward to working closely with the Farecast team to incorporate and apply its technology in new and interesting ways,” Microsoft PR director Whitney Burk said in a statement.

In January 2007, Farecast said it raised $12.1 million in Series C funding, and had raised $20.6 million to that point.

“This acquisition creates tremendous opportunities for the Farecast team and our customers,” Crean said. “We look forward to sharing more details in the weeks to come.”

First is live view. Canon claims its latest attempt is better, but I remain skeptical it’ll match the expectations of those with point-and-shoot cameras who’ve grown accustomed to framing the shots through the display rather than the viewfinder. Focusing sluggishness and pauses while a mirror flips up and down have seriously degraded live view on most SLRs.

Photography buffs who know their way around a $1,400 SLR may sneer at dummy modes for portrait, macro, and sports shots, or the new Creative Auto Mode (CA) that offers photographers English-language options such as “blur the background” and sets the camera accordingly. I think that’s shortsighted, though: even if you know how to best balance depth of field and shutter speed, perhaps somebody else in your family doesn’t. My complaint with the automatic settings is that at least in my camera, they only permit shooting in JPEG. I prefer raw, and even if somebody else is shooting, I’m usually the one who processes the images. (Update Oct. 9: The 50D can shoot raw even in the automatic modes. Huzzah! Another big advantage over my Rebel XT.)

Canon attributes the advance to “newly designed gapless microlenses over each pixel to reduce noise.” Microlenses gather light for the light-sensitive part of the image sensor, compensating for surface area occupied by other electronics. Gapless microlenses presumably stretch across the entire pixel width. Perhaps this technology will also help out whatever model will succeed Canon’s 5D, my other obvious upgrade path but one that likely would require spending twice the price for the camera body and that would require me to shell out another few hundred dollars for a new wide-angle lens to support the full-frame sensor size.

(Credit:
Canon)

My coworker Lori Grunin already covered Canon’s announcement of its $1,400 mid-range EOS 50D SLR, but as somebody who’s in the market for a new SLR, I thought I’d weigh in with some thoughts of my own. I’m glad Canon is investing where perhaps it counts most: the sensor. If the reviews look good, this will be the first time I’ve really been tempted to upgrade from my well-used Canon Rebel XT.

With a zoom range that long, you can bet the lens will have some serious compromises in areas such as sharpness, vignetting, distortion that can bow parallel lines into a barrel shape, or the chromatic aberration that can leave colored fringes around object edges. But that won’t matter much to the large fraction of SLR buyers who don’t want the expense, hassle, and bulk of multiple lenses. Nikon’s 18-200mm lens has been its best-selling ever, despite a similarly steep price tag and highly limited initial availability.

Fending off Nikon
Higher sensitivity is important for Canon. It’s been losing market share to Nikon, which has pushed high sensitivity as an advantage, though with lower megapixel counts. The full-frame sensors on Nikon’s D3 and D700 can reach ISO 25,600, though reaching that level was made easier through a sensor design that emphasizes a smaller number of larger pixels.

Canon's EOS 50D will ship in October for $1,399, not including a lens. Also shown here is the new EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens.

A more personal concern is weather sealing. I’m careful with my cameras, but I shoot sometimes in light rain, San Francisco mizzle, or waterfall spray. And on hiking and camping trips, dust is a serious concern. Full weather sealing is expensive, but it’s an area where Canon competitors have been leading the charge, and it’s important to me.

Two areas concern me, though.

The heart of Canon's 50D is this 15.1 megapixel sensor, whose increased sensitivity now reaches ISO 12,800.

That means Canon has done some serious work to cut down on the noise levels inside the sensor, which bodes well for image quality not just at the new extremes but also at more ordinary sensitivity settings. ISO 3,200, for example, is now part of the ordinary range, not the extended range that must be manually enabled before it’s available. Canon hit some sweet spots in sensor design, for example with its earlier 20D and the full-frame 5D, and the 50D holds the potential of being another model that balances megapixels with low noise and accurate color.

It’s probably not the lens for me, but I know several people waiting for something of its ilk, so Canon is smart to offer it. I’d probably rather put $700 toward a big telephoto lens if I were in a lavish spending mood.

Even then, I confess this all-purpose model is tempting for the next seven-day backpacking trip or Argentina tour when lugging lots of lenses is a huge effort. I have no such ambivalence with the 50D, though. It’s aimed squarely at photography enthusiasts such as myself, and you can bet I’ll be poring over the reviews to see if the 50D performance matches the promise of the press release.

The 50D has some other features that sound promising, including a higher-resolution 3-inch display, the new Digic 4 image-processing chip, a more dust-repellant sensor coating to avoid image-degrading speckles, HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) output for nicer output on high-definition TVs, and the higher-speed UDMA CompactFlash standard. It’s also got a built-in database of lens characteristics that can help correct for vignetting, the darker corners that some lenses produce.

Finally, a modern Canon ultrazoom
Another smart Canon countermove to Nikon is the EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens, costing $700 and also due in October.

(Credit:
Canon)

It doesn’t bother me much, since I’m happy with the viewfinder. But I have friends who demand it, and I do see its utility for taking shots while holding the camera overhead or low to the ground. Live view also is nice when you want to talk to photographic subjects rather than hide your face behind the camera.

More to come from Webware

It looks like Facebook is taking a slow approach to make sure that it can handle the increased load and scaling as users start playing with Chat, which is apparently just on a few networks so far.

Facebook on Sunday began a slow roll-out of its new Chat service.

In mid-March, Facebook gave a preview of the service and said it would be out in about two weeks. “When you log in to the site there is a Chat (user interface) at the bottom of the browser,” product manager Peter Deng said at the time. “It’s unobtrusive and there when you need it.” No download will be required for Chat, which integrates with a user’s Facebook friends list, and it works with all browsers, according to Deng.

Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has a tour of the new service. Justin’s quick review concludes that Facebook Chat is a “very compelling experience that will spell trouble for legacy IM networks that haven’t built vibrant social networks around their friend lists (i.e. AIM). By making Facebook more real time/presence oriented, Facebook session length should go up a lot. Facebook will become an important player in IM very soon.”