Ten Confirmed Dead, 34 Injured In Staten Island Ferry Crash
From: NY1
Ten people have been confirmed dead and 34 injured when the Staten Island ferry crashed while attempting to dock at the St. George terminal on Staten Island Wednesday afternoon.

The accident, the city's worst ferry accident in a century, sent screaming passengers fleeing the ship amid a barrage of shattered wood and broken glass.

The Associated Press had initially reported that 14 may have perished, but later determined that four victims had been mistakenly counted twice.

Dozens of victims were taken to Staten Island University Hospital and St. Vincent's Hospital as divers searched the water for passengers who might have jumped into the harbor to avoid injury. The Associated Press says that one body was recovered from the water, and that two of the victims lost limbs in the accident.

The mayor, speaking at an evening press conference, said that all the ship's crew members have been accounted for. He also denied a report that one of the ship's two captains left the ship following the accident, returned to his home, and attempted to shoot himself with a BB gun.

Authorities say the boat, the Andrew J. Barberi, was returning from Manhattan when it crashed into the ferry slip on Staten Island as it tried to dock shortly before 3:30 p.m.

"The whole side of the boat was ripped open," Bloomberg said. "It's a terrible tragedy, people who were on their way home all of a sudden taken from us. Our prayers are for their families and for those who were injured."

Eyewitnesses say the three-level ferry struck the wooden pilings that lead into the slip, causing a tear on the right side of the ship's hull at its lowest level. Some passengers aboard the ferry said the ship did not appear to slow down before it struck the pier.

There is speculation that high winds in the area may have played a part in the crash.

"There is no indication that this is anything other than a tragic accident. There is no reason whatsoever to believe this was done by any outside factor other than the wind, or the tide," Bloomberg said.

However, the mayor added that the ship’s crew is being interviewed, and tested for drugs and alcohol, as is the normal procedure following an accident.

The ferry involved in the crash has a 6,000-person capacity. The crash occurred shortly before the start of the afternoon rush hour, but it is not known how many people were aboard at the time.

Bob Carroll, a passenger on the boat, described the accident in a telephone interview with NY1: “I was sitting on the lower level on the left hand side when all of a sudden on the right hand side we hit the pilings. Everybody's screaming. The pilings protruded through the right hand side of the boat. Everybody jumped for their lives. The people on the right side of the boat, people were piling up, scrambling over each other. The whole side of the boat looked like a can opener opened. If I had been sitting on the right side of the boat, I'd have been dead. You could see some people were not going to make it. Some people clearly were not going to make it."

"We were close to the dock. All of a sudden I just heard a big, loud crash,” said Paul Weidemann, another passenger on the ferry. “Originally I thought it was a bomb because I heard the explosion and then I saw the pieces of the boat. I went back to get life preservers - we were afraid the boat was going to sink if we waited. I saw two or three people on the inside of the boat, I saw that they were stuck."

"All of a sudden I heard them say, 'Let's run, it's going to hit,’" said Luis Melendez, who was also on the ferry. "I did see one man on the floor who was screaming for help. The deckhands came down immediately to find anyone who was buried or injured. I did not witness anyone jump out anyone of the windows. But I know some people were thinking about jumping out."

The S.I. Ferry carries 70,000 people per day between Staten Island and Manhattan. All boats are currently suspended because of the accident, and city officials say service is unlikely to resume until Thursday morning at the earliest.

For those trying to get to Staten Island from Manhattan, transit officials are advising commuters to take the southbound R train to the 86th Street station in Brooklyn, where a shuttle bus will take them to Staten Island.

The S-53, S-79 and S-93 buses can also be taken to S.I. from 86th Street and Fourth Avenue.

Buses are also leaving from Battery Place and Greenwich Street in Manhattan that will take passengers to the St. George terminal.

The Red Cross has opened a family assistance center at the St. George terminal area, with mental health volunteers who will provide free counseling to anyone in need. Red Cross officials say people who need more information should call 1-877-RED-CROSS.

The city says anybody who has a question about a family member should call 311.

The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched a team from Washington, D.C., to begin an investigation of the accident.

More commercial wireless on its way
Found on: Cnet News.com
Boingo Wireless announced on Tuesday that it has signed agreements with three Wi-Fi companies that will extend the reach of its roaming network. The deals mean that the Santa Monica, Calif.-based start-up's network could reach more than 5,000 hot spots, once the locations go live in coming months. They also represent new carrier customers for Boingo's services applications.

On Monday, Boingo announced a deal with U.K. network operator The Cloud, adding about 2,500 hot spots to its network. The deals unveiled on Tuesday are with service providers: Dutch network operator PicoPoint and U.S.-based Infonet Services and Telecom Italia.

Shift Key Opens Door to CD and Criticism
Found on NY Times

The latest twist in the story of the music industry and the Internet generation involves a Phoenix company, a Princeton University graduate student and the shift key on a computer keyboard.

The student, John A. Halderman, a 22-year-old Princeton doctoral candidate in computer science, published a research paper on the Web revealing how easy it was to skirt a new security feature of the music industry. "I believe artists are entitled to be compensated," he said in an interview. "My hope is that my research demonstrates how weak these technologies can be."

Mr. Halderman had tested the encryption technology used on a CD by the R&B singer Anthony Hamilton, released by Arista/BMG. The technology was meant to be the first to allow a buyer to make several, but not limitless, copies of the songs. Earlier encryption experiments did not allow any copying. Mr. Halderman found that by holding down the shift key after inserting the disk he was able to override the encryption software, freeing him to make as many copies as he liked.

Peter Jacobs, chief executive of SunnComm, the creator of the encryption software, said Mr. Halderman was free to make his discovery, but that did not give him the right to publish a paper and send it to reporters. Mr. Jacobs and BMG said the security feature was not designed to be foolproof but was merely the latest experiment in piracy deterrence.

Mr. Jacobs was quoted threatening to sue Mr. Halderman and Princeton over the $10 million decline in the company's stock last week. . But he said on Friday that after receiving "three thousand e-mails'' criticizing him, he had decided not to sue. Instead, in the interest of encouraging encryption research, Mr. Jacobs, being cynical, said, he would consider the plunge in shares as a "donation of $10 million to Princeton.''

When do I get my teen robot
It dances. It can hold a conversation. And in about a year, humanoid robot Qrio will be knocking on doors, if Sony's plans fall into place.

Nobuyuki Idei, CEO of Sony, gave the first North American demonstration of Qrio on Saturday as part of a speech delivered to the Japan Society of Northern California. He also looked beyond gadgetry to the broader context of Japan's changing economic and cultural status.


Qrio--a toddler-sized machine in an aluminum sleeper and a space helmet--can navigate an obstacle course, right itself after a fall, sense heat and surfaces, recognize people through their voice or face, and respond with gestures or words to questions, according to Sony. More at news.com

Sharp launches 3D notebook
Found on: news.com
The Actius RD3D comes with a specialized 15-inch 3D screen that the company hopes will usher in a new way of looking at computers.

Sharp has released a notebook with a 3D screen that the company hopes will usher in a new way of looking at computers.

The Actius RD3D comes with a specialized 15-inch screen with a so-called parallax barrier that lets people view 3D images or run 3D applications without special glasses. For example, bodies and bullets appear to fly all over the place in a version of popular game "Quake" that has been adjusted to work on Sharp's 3D monitors.

The notebook also comes with a software bundle from Dynamic Digital Depth (DDD) that can give flat applications, videos and pictures a three-dimensional look on the fly.

"You can scan in images of famous artwork, like the Mona Lisa, and suddenly make a 3D version of it," said Chris Yewdall, chief executive of DDD.

Bringing 3D viewing to the computing world has been a longtime goal for the industry. Several companies have come out with Web browser software and other technology that make images appear to pop off the screen, but the Web largely remains a two-dimensional world--albeit populated with images that are drawn in 3D perspective to make them appear more realistic.

To help jump-start the market, Sharp, Sony and others formed a group earlier this year, called the 3D Consortium to hammer out standards for 3D displays and to examine issues, such as eyestrain, that may hamper adoption.

NTT DoCoMo already sells phones containing a small 3D screen from Sharp based on the same technology. Sharp has been showing prototypes of the Actius RD3D since late last year.

Enhancing displays is at the core of the Japanese giant's strategy. Sharp, which reported a $557 million profit in fiscal 2002, is one of the leaders in the market for thin-film transistor (TFT) displays, glass with embedded electronics used to build liquid-crystal display (LCD) screens. The company has a major presence in the LCD monitor market in Europe and Japan.

Sharp's notebooks, in fact, are primarily a vehicle to show off the company's displays. The Actius MM10--which was shown off at Comdex Fall 2002 under its Japanese name Muramasa--is about half an inch thick and weighs just over 2 pounds, a design made possible in part because of the screen. The company also has released notebooks with wide displays.

Sharp said it is considering bringing out 3D desktop LCD monitors. Toshiba is working on a similar 3D monitor, according to sources close to the company.

Eyeing big business Although the consumer market seems like a natural fit, the Actius RD3D will initially be aimed at the business market. Engineers, product designers, pharmaceutical companies, and oil and gas researchers, in particular, will be targeted. A molecular modeling application comes with the notebook.

The software bundle from DDD will allow consumers to view materials in 3D, even if the original developers do not tweak their applications. The DDD bundle consists of three parts: TriDef Movie Player for making 3D video, Photo Viewer for digital images, and Visualizer software for simulating 3D on standard applications. The DDD software essentially works by intercepting the original code and re-rendering it.

"You've got a lot of (software) customers out there who are very interested, but you have a lack of 3D displays out there," DDD's Yewdall said.

Screens that can show 3D images will likely be a niche, but the technology will have its adherents. "There are some applications where it will be useful: medical, imaging, gaming," said Alan Promisel, an analyst with IDC. Some have said that there are nearly 1,000 games that have been 3D-optimized, he said.

The notebook can be switched to two-dimensional viewing, according to Sharp, so that it can also run spreadsheets and other applications in which 3D would likely be an annoyance.

The RD3D's monitor can be thought of as a TFT sandwich. The monitor, developed by Sharp and Sharp Laboratories Europe, contains two TFT panels separated by a parallax barrier, which directs pixel images to two separate regions so that each eye receives a slightly different image. Like in commercially available holograms that display 3D images, faint vertical lines appear on the screen.

"The left eye sees only the left-eye image, and the right eye sees only the right-eye image," Ian Matthew, a development manager at Sharp Systems of America, said in a statement. "Since these images have perspective and are offset in the same way that the human eye normally sees the two images, the brain naturally interprets the image disparity and creates a 'sense of depth' effect."

The notebook is not priced for bargain hunters. It costs $3,299 and comes with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, a Nvidia GeForce 4 440 graphics chip, a recording DVD drive, a 60GB hard drive and 512MB of memory.

vnunet.com Samba beats Windows
By Roger Howorth [13-10-2003]
Samba 3 runs rings around Windows Server 2003 in file serving performance

Tests by IT Week Labs show the latest version of the open-source Samba file and print server software is 2.5 times faster than Windows Server 2003 in the same role.

The news comes as many firms are grappling with the consequences of Microsoft ending support for NT4, coupled with uncertainty about when Microsoft will next update Windows. The performance difference between Windows Server 2003 and Samba 3 has increased dramatically compared with Samba 2 and Windows 2000 Server.

Samba provides file and print services to Windows PCs. It enables a Linux or Unix server to work as a file server for client PCs running Windows software. The new version also introduces support for Microsoft's Active Directory for allocating and controlling user access rights.

Samba 3's scalability is as impressive as its performance. While Windows performance scales up well initially, it then drops off quickly as more clients access the server. In contrast, Samba 3 offered excellent throughput up to the limit of our test, conducted on a low-spec Intel server.

Consequently, firms could save money on licence fees, and on hardware, by using Samba instead of Windows servers. IT consultant Alan Munday, who recommends Samba to his clients, said the resulting saving was a key consideration for firms.

Munday is already using version 3 at some smaller sites. However, he was dismissive of Active Directory. 'I'm not [interested in the new Active Directory features] because the primary focus for my smaller clients is to migrate away from their ageing NT servers.'"