Classic fish

Called EnergyWise, the software is a free upgrade to Cisco Catalyst switches that can monitor and manage how energy is used on IP-connected devices, including phones and wireless routers. This summer Cisco will release a version, based on Verdiem’s Surveyor PC management software, that reduces energy levels of PCs.

Cisco to manage energy of tech gear and buildings

Cisco Systems on Tuesday introduced software for controlling energy use in networked computing equipment as well as building heating and cooling systems.

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET’s Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.

Like many technology companies, Cisco has been hit hard by the worldwide recession. Its revenue is slowing as its corporate customers and large communications service providers slow spending. In its second fiscal quarter, the company’s revenue dipped by about 7.5 percent to $9.1 billion compared to the previous year.

Instead of major workforce reductions to control costs, Cisco is focusing on reducing expenses by $1 billion by the end of fiscal year 2009. To achieve this goal it has taken a “pause” in hiring and reduced travel, offsite meetings, outside services, equipment, events, prototypes, marketing, and other activities.

And things are only going to get worse, Chambers warned. He expects sales to dip as much as 20 percent in the next quarter. That said, Chambers has also said that Cisco is well-positioned to emerge even stronger after the economic malaise. The company has been investing in new markets, such as consumer electronics and video for the past couple of years.

Chambers insisted the company is not planning a major layoff, which he defined as cutting 10 percent or more of the company’s workforce. Cisco currently employs about 67,000 people worldwide.

Cisco sheds jobs as it 'realigns' business

Technology stalwart Cisco Systems has begun “realigning” its workforce and has confirmed that it has started laying off workers this week.

British Airways to allow in-flight texting

Go ahead, send that all-important text.

Other airlines have experimented with in-flight cell phone use, including Ryanair, Qantas, Air France, and Emirates. Only Emirates allows voice calls onboard, but other airlines, British Airways included, say they might permit in-flight talking, depending on passenger feedback.

British Airways didn’t disclose pricing for the service, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it was included in the price of the business-class ticket. Though avoiding the trek to Heathrow may attract busy financial titans shuttling between The City and Wall Street, the price of a ticket is not expected to be cheap.

Kent German is a senior editor for cell phone reviews at CNET. When he’s not testing the newest handsets on the market, he’s blogging about cell phone news for Crave. In his On Call column, he answers reader questions and gives his take on the rapidly changing mobile industry. E-mail Kent.

(Credit:Airbus)

The airline will limit the service to twice-daily flights between London City Airport and New York’s JFK that are due to start in September. The all-business class route is flown by a narrow-body Airbus A318 aircraft that must make a stop in Ireland on the westbound leg. The configuration will allow for just 32 seats.

Blogging live from Spiral Jetty

Bring the ;Noise - Halos Heaven

Don’t get me wrong I love me some Rally Monkey and some Ba Da Da Da Da Da DAAA!!! CHARGE!!!!!!!

160 votes | Poll has closed

Im all for it! A player I hate, on a team I hate. Think of the boo’s he would get from his own fans. . I would watch just to see the reaction of yankee fans, see Bonds hit in Boston and the New York press make him melt down. I dont think it will happen would make the chemistry worse on a team with already bad chemistry and bad PR issues.

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/8347236/Matsui-rehab-hits-snag;-Yanks-may-look-at-Bonds

With a view to drawing mainstream media coverage, the earlier Winter Soldier event in D.C. had been closed to the general public. The hoped-for mainstream media coverage did not materialize, but IVAW experienced a burst of growth, its membership expanding rapidly in the months following the event. The strategy for the Northwest Regional Winter Soldier, in contrast, was to be inclusive. The organizers were keen to involve not just the community in Seattle, but also in surrounding areas, in the event. In order to energize public antiwar sentiment and capitalize on it, the veterans led a determined demonstration of hundreds through the streets of downtown Seattle, following the hearings at the Town Hall. Traffic was halted for nearly an hour by protestors chanting slogans of U.S. out of the Middle East, No Justice, No Peace, and carrying placards that read, You Can’t Be All You Can Be If You’re Dead!

Of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and all others complicit in orchestrating the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Diaz says, I think they should be tried, by members of the American community, and also by the Iraqi people. What they have done is inexcusable, and whatever is done to them, no matter how harsh, will still not suffice to bring justice to the Iraqi people and the American people after what they have suffered.
Diaz believes,

In 2004, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote an article for the Nation. Sharing his insights about the invasion and occupation of Iraq he writes about, atrocity-producing situations, which occur when a power structure creates an environment where ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities…This kind of atrocity-producing situation…surely occurs to some degree in all wars, including World War II, our last ‘good war.’ But a counterinsurgency war in a hostile setting, especially when driven by profound ideological distortions, is particularly prone to sustained atrocity — all the more so when it becomes an occupation.

Despite what the Pentagon and its chief agent, mainstream American media, project about the overwhelming national and international support that legitimize the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is enough evidence to indicate otherwise. The question that begs introspection is whether the American public will put this evidence to use to build sufficient pressure on the government to change America’s foreign policy.

I was taught as a marine to eat the apple to the core. April 18, 2006, was the date of my first confirmed kill. I called him the fat man. He was innocent. I killed him in front of his father and friend as he was walking home. My first shot made him scream and look into my eyes, so I looked at my friend and said, Well, I can’t let that happen, and shot him again. After my first kill, I was congratulated…I want to apologize for the hate and destruction that I and others have inflicted on innocent people. It is not okay, and this is happening, and until people hear of what is going on, it is going to continue. Today I am no longer the monster that I once was.

A smaller, modern-day incarnation of VVAW is IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War), which was founded in 2004. It seeks to offer a platform to those who have served in the military since September 11, 2001, to speak out against what they see as an unjust, illegal, and unwinnable war in Iraq. At the time of this writing, IVAW had more than 1,400 members in 49 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and on military bases overseas. IVAW held a national conference called Winter Solider: Iraq and Afghanistan outside Washington, D.C., in March 2008. The four-day event brought together more than 200 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in both occupations. Although largely ignored by the corporate press, the event was of historical significance. For the first time since the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, former and current members of the U.S. military had organized with the specific purpose to make public the truth of their experience. It was hoped, in vain as it turned out, that the testimonies of veterans would provide the press with sufficient information to report on the truly catastrophic nature of the occupations and rouse people to take action.

Jason Hurd, posted in central Baghdad from November 2004 to November 2005, testified how, after his unit took stray rounds from a nearby firefight, a machine gunner responded by firing more than 200 rounds into a nearby building.

Speaking on a panel about the rules of engagement (ROE) was Adam Kokesh, whom I had met at the veterans’ house in D.C. He had served with the marines in Fallujah for about a year from February 2004. He held up a small card for the audience to see, the ROE issued to soldiers in Iraq, which stated, Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself. He elaborated on the condition of reasonable certainty that allowed for the use of deadly force under the ROE and led to countless civilian deaths. We changed the ROE more often than we changed our underwear. At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city [Fallujah], and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark. I don’t think soldiers should ever be put in situations where they must choose between their morals and their instinct for survival.

At the same hearing, an emotional Jon Michael Turner pulled his military medals off his shirt and flung them down as the audience cheered. He had served two tours as a machine gunner in Iraq.

The phrase Winter Soldiers was adopted by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) when they organized the first Winter Soldier event in response to the human rights violations that were occurring in Vietnam. The event, called Winter Soldier Investigation, was held in Detroit from January 31, 1971, to February 2, 1971, and was intended to publicize war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. Armed Forces in the Vietnam War. VVAW challenged the morality and conduct of the war by exposing the direct relationship between military policies and war crimes in Vietnam. The three-day gathering of 109 veterans and 16 civilians included discharged servicemen from each branch of military service, civilian contractors, medical personnel, and academics, all of whom presented testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed during 1963–1970.

Marine Vincent Emmanuel was posted near the northern Iraqi city of Al-Qaim from 2004 to 2005, and disclosed in his testimony that taking potshots at cars that drove by happened all the time and were not isolated incidents. We took fire while trying to blow up a bridge. Many of the attackers were part of the general population. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything in order to push through the town. I remember myself emptying magazines into the town, never identifying a target. Co-panelists nodded in agreement as he confessed to abusing prisoners he knew to be innocent. We took it upon ourselves to harass them, sometimes took them to the desert and threw them out of our Humvees, kicking and punching them even as we did so.

We fired indiscriminately at this building. Things like that happened every day in Iraq. We reacted out of fear for our lives, and we reacted with total destruction. Over time, as the absurdity of war set in, individuals from my unit indiscriminately opened fire at vehicles driving down the wrong side of the road. People in my unit would later brag. I remember how appalled I was that we could be laughing about such things, but that was the reality…We’re disrupting not only the lives of Iraqis but also the lives of our veterans with this occupation. If a foreign occupying force came here to the United States, do you not think that every person that has a shotgun would come out of the hills and fight for his right for self-determination? Ladies and gentlemen, that country is suffering from our occupation, and ending that suffering begins with the total and immediate withdrawal of all of our troops.

We’ve heard from the politicians, from the generals, from the media — now it’s our turn, announced Iraq war veteran Kelly Dougherty, who served in Iraq as a military police officer in 2003. It’s not going to be easy to hear what we have to say. It’s not going to be easy for us to tell it. But we believe that the only way this war is going to end is if the American people truly understand what we have done in their name.

Book: Microsoft promised Toshiba HD DVD support

Even after it was clear that Blu-ray would win the DVD format race, Microsoft continued to stand behind the rival HD DVD.

Microsoft lawyer Anne Kelley and her team were trying to get Toshiba to sign a deal in a matter of weeks as opposed to the year or so such an agreement would normally take to hammer out. The HD DVD pledge was only part of Microsoft’s effort, which also included sharing some of the future things it was working on that might interest Toshiba.

“Kelley’s team also reaffirmed its support for Toshiba in its battle with Sony over DVD formats,” Phelps and Kline wrote. “As she put it, ‘we let them know that Microsoft would stick with them till the end.’”

During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina.

At the same time, winning the deal with Toshiba was key for Microsoft in its efforts to convince large companies, even those with broader patent portfolios, to cross-license Microsoft’s technology.

The battle between the formats was a high-stakes affair, with Toshiba and Blu-ray proponent Sony each trying to line up backers for their formats. In the computer world, Intel and Microsoft backed HD DVD, while Dell and HP aligned with Blu-ray.

(Credit:Amazon.com)