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(Credit:
Nicole Lee/CNET Networks)

LG Vu showing ‘The Tonight Show’

An anonymous source just provided the Boy Genius Report some details on the upcoming AT&T Mobile TV that’s set to debut in May. As you’ll recall, AT&T Mobile TV will offer live over-the-air television via Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, and will be offered first on the LG Vu and the Samsung Access. Well, the new details suggest that the service will launch on May 4, and will come in three flavors: Limited, Basic, and Plus. The Limited edition includes four channels (Fox Mobile, CBS Mobile, NBC, and NBC News) for $13 a month, the Basic edition includes nine channels (Fox Mobile, CBS Mobile, NBC, NBC News, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, CNN Mobile, ESPN) for $15 a month, and the Plus edition includes the aforementioned nine channels, as well as a Sony Pictures channel for $30 a month. We gave AT&T Mobile TV a brief hands-on at
CTIA, and we were suitably impressed with the fast loading times with no buffering. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get a real thorough review of the service once it eventually debuts. Stay tuned!

Steve Ballmer, speaking at a conference in Milan, Italy, said “we know what Yahoo’s worth. $44 billion is a lot of money,” according to a Dow Jones report.

Yahoo on Tuesday reported that its first-quarter net income increased dramatically and reported earnings per share of 11 cents, 2 cents above analyst estimates.

Ballmer added that Microsoft is “prepared to move forward alone without Yahoo.”

Ballmer made similar comments on Tuesday, ahead of Yahoo’s earnings report.

Microsoft’s CEO on Wednesday indicated that the company is unlikely to raise its bid for Yahoo and is prepared to walk away from the deal.

Regardless of your specific needs, having a robots.txt file can be important to a site. Rarely is there a site that can’t benefit from disallowing at least some content. Even if you have nothing to disallow, you may want to take advantage of the auto-discovery feature for your XML sitemap. Finally, depending on your server log system or analytics package, not having a robots.txt file can be problematic if it inflates your “404 File Not Found” error reporting, which can happen because search engine spiders will request the robots.txt file automatically when they come to your site.

There is more information about the protocol, though a bit more on the technical side, at the robotstxt.org site and you can find more engine specific information on crawling and robots.txt from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Google’s Webmaster Central has become a very important resource for anyone who has a Web site, works on a Web site, or, like SEO practitioners, helps others with their Web sites.

One important tip is that the following directive tells all spiders they are allowed to go anywhere:

Google continues to roll out more features and better functionality to existing features, and now they just did a little bit of both with the addition of their Generate robots.txt function.

The latter tells the spiders to stay out of the entire site–clearly two very different results, so be sure you understand which does what.

And, more importantly, the following directive, which I sometimes see when I think people really wanted the above:

Right now, the robots.txt generator is rather basic and I hope that Google will add more features to it going forward. Currently, site owners have to paste in URLs and URL patterns to build the file. It would be great if it would provide a list of URLs or patterns extracted from a site to help automate the procedure for anyone not familiar with the protocol.

Google had previously added a robots.txt analyzer, which at this point is still the more useful of the two tools. For those who aren’t aware, the robots exclusion protocol helps with instructing search engines how to interact with a Web site. There are a number of directives available, but the main purpose of the robots.txt file is to instruct the search engines about content that a site owner doesn’t want the robots to crawl.

Why in the world would you not want search engines to crawl any of your content? You may have content that, for whatever reason, you don’t want others to find through search results. Note, however, that this is not the same as secure information that requires authentication through a log-in.

Or you may have duplicate content issues that you could use robots.txt to filter out. This is especially common with a content management system (CMS) that creates a separate printer-friendly page.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Your site may have its own search function that creates “search results” for your site. Search engines generally do not want to include search results within search results, so this content may not be returned for searches on the engines anyway, so you might want to focus the crawlers elsewhere for greater crawler efficiency.

Traditional wireless companies like AT&T are bidding on spectrum. The auction has also attracted several wireless newcomers such as Google, TV satellite provider EchoStar Communications, cable operator Cablevision Systems, and wireless chipmaker Qualcomm.

Verizon, which has traditionally been the most strict operator in the U.S. about what it lets on its network, recently said it would allow non-certified devices on its network.

“The FCC got it right in putting this spectrum to work for consumers’ best interests,” Christopher Libertelli, senior director of government and regulatory affairs for Skype, said in a statement. “We look forward to the day when this spectrum is made available to the broader market, so that Skype users can have their conversations whenever and wherever they would like.”

Now that the open access rule has been triggered, it will be interesting to see what happens next in the auction. Earlier in the week, there was speculation that the “C” block might not reach the reserve price. After intense early bidding, the price seemed to languish. Even though there is no way to tell who is bidding, if the bidding slows again or if someone drops out, it might be an indication that Google was simply trying to pump up the price.

The auction could last for weeks or possibly months, depending on how long the bidding goes on. The auction was expected to generate at least $10 billion. As of Thursday morning, the total bids came to $12.79 billion for all five spectrum blocks.

Skype, which makes software that allows people to make free and low-cost phone calls over the Internet, issued a statement praising the FCC for putting in the open access. Currently, most U.S. operators do not allow Skype to be used on handsets that operate on their networks.

Regardless of whether Google stays in the auction or not, now that the minimum has been reached, the company that eventually wins the spectrum license will have to make their network open to any devices and applications, which is exactly what Google wanted from the beginning.

The “C” block is one of five blocks of spectrum in the 700MHz frequency that is being auctioned off. The spectrum is being turned back into the government auction by broadcast television operators who will switch their broadcasts to digital from analog in February 2009. The spectrum is considered valuable because it can travel long distances and penetrate obstacles like walls.

Today, U.S. wireless operators have tight control over which devices can be used on their networks and which applications can be used on those handsets. Google and other companies, such as Skype, have complained that this is too restrictive.

There’s a good chance the company bid on the spectrum to make sure it reached the $4.6 billion threshold to trigger the open access requirements. And now that those requirements have been met, the company may bow out of the race.

The reserve price on a valuable sliver of spectrum was reached in the Federal Communications Commission’s 700MHz auction on Thursday, triggering rules that would make the spectrum accessible to any device or software application.

But there is also a chance that Google has the winning bid. And if it does, the company may end up with the spectrum anyway.

Because the bidders in the auction are anonymous, it’s difficult to know who is bidding on it. But many analysts believe that Google and Verizon Wireless are the two most likely bidders in the auction. Google CEO Eric Schmidt had said publicly the company was willing to put up at least the minimum reserve price for the spectrum.

After the 17th round in the auction, a bidder for eight licenses in the “C” block of the 700MHz spectrum auction surpassed the minimum reserve price of $4.64 billion, which had been set by the FCC before the auction began. The current bid is now at $4.71 billion. The minimum bid for round 21 is $5.18 billion, according to the FCC’s Web site.

Some experts have speculated that Google may want the spectrum to build its own wireless network to compete with traditional players such as AT&T and Verizon. Others think that Google wants to build a wireless network that it can lease to other operators. But I’m more inclined to believe that Google may not really want the spectrum at all.

In any case, we have to give the quirky Torrance, Calif.-based MotoArt credit for high levels of creativity. The bed is designed and fabricated from two DC-9 rear stabilizers and a C-130 inner flap. It’s 11 feet long; 7 feet, 6 inches wide; and 4 feet, 6 inches high. All surfaces are sanded and mirror polished, and it’s accented by Plexiglass and illuminated with internal LED lighting. We’re so picturing an Austin Powers seduction ritual right now.

At $35,000 (and no, those pretty flowers on the bedstand aren’t included), this mod piece of furniture had better lift you to new altitudes of um, comfort and style. You could, after all, get a two-seat Cessna 152 for less. And seriously, if you’re that intent on joining that proverbial action-in-the-sky club, might we suggest you just snag a couple of Southwest tickets?

“Join the mile-high club without the hassle of going to the airport,” MotoArt says of its new Mile High Bed, which, like all of the company’s products, is created from aircraft inventory.

(Credit:
MotoArt)

MotoArt–which also brought us the B-52 Stratofortress Ejector Seat Chair–finds its inventory in hangars and barns the world over. To date, it has designed and fabricated nearly 100 styles of recycled functional art.

(Credit:
Piriform Software)

Along with the programs I expected to find on the list were two names I didn’t recognize: “Otto” and “PS2″. CCleaner wasn’t any help identifying the programs, nor was XP’s own Add or Remove Programs applet. After searching the Web for both “otto.exe” and “ps2.exe”, I figured out that the former was a game that accompanies Windows Media Center Edition, and the latter was a keyboard utility from the PC’s vendor, HP.

It would be nice if Windows provided some clues about the programs it lists in XP’s Add or Remove Programs and Vista’s Programs and Features. For example, Programs and Features on my Vista system lists the Viewpoint Media Player, but it offers no hint as to where the program came from, apart from the date it was installed. From what I was able to gather after a Web search, the utility is related to the display of 3D effects in AIM.

The last time I ran CCleaner on my XP test machine, it freed up almost 2GB of hard-drive space by removing temporary Internet files, sweeping out the Recycle Bin, and deleting various Windows updates and other system and application files I no longer needed. Then I clicked the program’s Tools option to view the applications installed on the PC.

However the program managed to slip onto my PC, removing it freed up more than 7MB of hard-disk space. At least the Viewpoint player wasn’t in my auto-start list. I’ll take a paring knife to that roster in a future post.

Since I use Trillian and Google Talk for my IM sessions, I don’t need the Viewpoint player. A bigger question is how the program got on my PC in the first place. It didn’t come preinstalled on the machine, and no other programs were loaded on the same date as it was. Still, the next most recent software installation was AIM itself, which had an installation date one month later than the Viewpoint player.

Use CCleaner's Tools options to view the programs installed on your PC, and remove those you no longer need.

I’m always looking for a little bit more performance from my PCs, so I regularly use Piriform’s free CCleaner utility to clear out the clutter on my systems’ hard drives. (Note that CCleaner is donationware, so if you find yourself using it regularly, drop a few ducats in the virtual coffer.)

That was all I needed to know to decide that Otto could go, but PS2 should hang around lest I someday plug in an “enhanced” keyboard and might actually want to use the specialty control buttons on the top row. These are the buttons that let you open apps or your favorite Web pages, control the PC’s volume, and perform other system operations, such as putting the system into sleep mode.