KEVIN MARTIN, CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION, is recommending that the commission approve the proposed merger between the XM and Sirius satellite radio services.  The chairman’s recommendations carry a lot of influence with the commission members, but it is nonetheless uncertain whether they will go along.  The full commission will vote on it very quickly after they have had time to receive and study the recommendations.

The Dept. of Justice Anti-trust division approved the merger in March.  In order to achieve the approval, the two firms voluntarily agreed to several concessions including a new pricing plan that will allow subscribers to purchase a la carte groupings of their preferred channels instead of the entire spectrum.  They also agreed to open the radio instrument manufacture to competition so that anybody could build and sell the receivers.

For a more complete review of the terms and the status of the merger, read the Assoc. Press story HERE.

ACADEMIC RESEARCHERS AT LEEDS UNIVERSITY IN ENGLAND have developed a clothes washer that will clean a full load of clothing with just one cup of water.

These researchers have been alarmed by the increasing use of water for washing  that has occurred because more people can afford to buy washing machines now.  Water usage in washing machines has risen 23% in the past 15 years.  (Firegeezer notes that the UK is an island, completely surrounded by large seas.)

The machine works by using thousands of plastic chips  -  each about half a centimetre in size  -  to absorb and remove dirt.  Around 44 lbs. of the chips are added to each load, along with a cup of water and detergent. During the washing cycle, the water is heated to help dissolve the dirt, which is then absorbed by the plastic chips.

When the cleaning cycle is over, the clothes are still dry so you don’t need to use a clothes dryer.

Professor Stephen Burkinshaw, the machine’s inventor, said tests have produced ‘quite astonishing’ results.  “We’ve shown that it can remove all sorts of everyday stains including coffee and lipstick whilst using a tiny fraction of the water used by conventional washing machines,” he said. 

They also believe the technology could be used for dry-cleaning shops and thus eliminate the need for dangerous solvents.

While the machine, named Xeros, is still in the development stage, the inventors are working with a commercial firm and hope to have a model on the market next year.

Read the full story in the Daily Mail HERE.

COMING SOON TO AN AMBULANCE NEAR YOU. An innovative and effective medicine-delivery device designed for children who are apprehensive about syringes.

The MediDome™ is a simple invasive device that injects a prepackaged dose of medicine through a built-in needle that doesn’t have the frightening appearance that a syringe has. It’s use is described:

MediDome has a unique tester to ensure that a vein has not been ruptured during intramuscular or subcutaneous injection. A sterile cover is removed to expose adhesive wings that stick the MediDome to the required area for injection. The person administering the injection removes the blister cap and presses down on the top of MediDome until a little resistance is felt. A bubble on one of the wings is checked for blood - if it fills up the injection is halted. If all is well, they then give a small firm press until a click is heard, then softly compress and hold the dome. On release, MediDome returns to its original shape (but cannot be compressed again), is removed from the arm and disposed of for incineration. It is a fail safe single use design - once used it can never be used again.

The device was invented and designed by a 21-yr.-old college student in Newcastle, England. He has also adapted the device to be used in absorption delivery. The packets are color-coded by medicines and dosages and they have a safety check whereas if the peel-off backing is removed or tampered with, the rim color changes.

Read more about this nifty tool HERE.

THAT’S WHAT I GET FOR REPORTING (scroll down) on the fire at The Planet hosting service’s Houston facility earlier.

Shortly after I posted it, MY server went down for a couple of hours.  If you couldn’t log on for a while, that’s why.  But they got it fixed and I’m back and ready to post again.

These things happen.  Thanks for checking back.

THE PLANET IS A DEDICATED SERVER PROVIDER THAT hosts websites for thousands of customers world-wide.  They are located in Texas and have six separate sites where their servers are operating.

Saturday evening and fire in an electrical room caused an electrical explosion that knocked out three walls of the room containing the electrical equipment and brought operations in that facility to a halt.

Fortunately none of the servers themselves were damaged by the fire, but approximately 9,000 websites were knocked offline.  The outage did not affect their other server locations and they expected to have full service restored by late Monday evening.

An official with the company released the following statement on Saturday night:

This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers

They have backup generators, but the Houston fire marshal prohibited using them until a full inspection of the electrical system was completed.  Early this morning the generators were turned on and the servers are beginning to come online, but it will be later on Monday night before full service is restored.

The Houston Chronicle has a late report HERE. 

If you have been having a problem accessing some of your favorite websites since yesterday, it might well be that they are hosted by The Planet.  Firegeezer is hosted by a different company and is not affected by this.

DIRECT DOWNLOADING OF MOVIES and other digital media advanced another step during the past ten days.  Firegeezer readers already knew this was coming because we’ve been talking about it.  Now we are watching it happen.

Netflix announced last week that they will immediately begin selling a set-top box that will allow their subscribers to stream videos directly from Netflix’ website to their television set.

The device is about the size of a paperback book and you plug the output connection to your television.  It is WiFi compatible, so you don’t need to hardwire it to your computer for the streaming of the program.  Netflix is initially offering 10,000 movies and tv episodes from its library for the service.

There are two financial expenditures needed by the subscriber.  First is a mandatory purchase of the “box” for $100.  Next is the “unlimited” subscription of $8.99 a month to use it.  But there are no other charges.  People who already have the unlimited service from Netflix can plug right in and play…. it’s the same service, just skipping the snail mail part and no returns necessary.

The box is made and sold directly by Roku and really is quite small, 5 in. by 5 in. and is HD-ready, once Netflix decides to download the HD versions of its library.  Within a year there will be other brands of receivers on the market which will bring the price down a bit.  Netflix is already working with four other manufacturers that are getting ready to enter the market.

*  *  *  *  *

Blockbuster unveiled on Wednesday their new in-store kiosk that will download movies onto the customer’s own portable storage device.  Their pricing structure is similar to Netflix’ at $10 monthly, but initially you have to visit the store to download your movie, which will take about two minutes.  However, Blockbuster expects to get that down to 30 seconds shortly.

It’s advantage over the downstreaming service is that you can carry the movie with you and view it whenever and wherever you choose, such as when you are away from home on a trip.

Blockbuster will soon be introducing its own version of the at-home streaming service that they are calling Movielink.  So there will be two choices available for downloading delivery.  Beginning in June they will operate the kiosks in a select number of stores to smooth out the kinks before going nationwide with them.

FATAL FALLS FROM TOWERS OF ALL KINDS, water, communications, electric, in the U. S. totalled 10 in number last year.

This year there were none for the first three months, then over a span of 5 weeks there were 6 deaths on cell-phone towers alone.  Five of them were during a 12-day span and half of the six were AT&T contractors.

Wireless Estimator photo

A lot of people are speculating that AT&T has been pressuring the tower workers to work faster in order to meet a June deadline for enhanced service capability for Apple’s iPhone project.

Fortune Magazine reports:

On May 21, AT&T issued a press release describing its $20 billion roll-out of a nationwide 3G network. It promised to have 275 of the markets it serves in the U.S. 3G-ready by the end of June, and to finish the remaining 75 by the end of the year.  AT&T is the exclusive U.S. carrier for Apple’s iPhone. A new, 3G version of that device is widely expected to be released in June.

A spokesman for AT&T Mobile confirms that Jonathan Guilford was working on a tower for an AT&T 3G network, but denies that his death or the others had anything to do with the June deadline. “That is a software upgrade,” says William Marks. “You go to each tower and use a laptop to perform the upgrade at the base station at the bottom of the tower. There is no need to climb towers.”

What he didn’t say, however, is that the workers have to climb the towers to trouble-shoot any problems.  After all, they were up there before they fell.

Read the complete Fortune Magazine article HERE.

ATTENTION: SCUBA DIVERS!  (and poor swimmers),

Just in time for your upcoming trip to the coral reef, here is the world’s only swim mask that has an integrated waterproof digital camera.

No longer do you have to unstrap the camera from your arm or your shoulder strap.  You just aim your head and snap.  The 5-megapixel camera will take both stills and video and operates at up to 15 ft. depths.  Maybe you’re one of those people who likes to lay on your back on the bottom of the pool and look at…. ummm…. other people.  Nobody will ever suspect a thing with your Digital Camera Swim Mask.

To learn more and to order your tech toy for only $99.95, click HERE.  (You’ll have to buy two AAA batteries to make it work.)

THE MARS LANDER NAMED PHOENIX ARRIVED SAFELY and deployed properly yesterday.

After photographing its landing and surroundings, it shut off the cameras so that it could save the battery power to deploy the solar panels that are now generating the current that powers the device.

NASA/JPL/Cal-Tech/Univ. of Arizona

Tomorrow a robotic arm will dig a 3-ft.-deep trench and scoop the soil and (hopefully) any ice found into a chemical processing center within the lander.  Then it will analyze the samples.  Wow!

Here is the link to NASA’s website where you can read all about what’s going on and view all the photos as they are sent back to earth:
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/ 

Be patient, there are about 1/2-billion people trying to log on, but I got through without any difficulty.

TWO WEEKS AFTER MICROSOFT WALKED AWAY from its offer to purchase Yahoo!, the two companies are saying that negotiations have resumed.

Microsoft, wishing to get into the internet advertising business, had made an offer to purchase Yahoo! at a price equal to $31 per share.  Up until that time, it was trading at around $29 and slipping.  Yahoo! responded by insisting that they receive $37, leading MS to just walk away saying that they’re not interested anymore.

This caused Yahoo!’s price to plummet back to $27 and that didn’t make the stockholders happy at all.  A group of the company’s biggest investors then pressured the Board of Directors to reopen talks with Microsoft with the focus on selling off their advertising business outright and then maintaining their other internet interests.

Some market watchers think that the possibility still exists for a complete takeover, though.  We will have to watch how this chess match plays out through this week.

Scott Moritz of Fortune Magazine has an UPDATE.

Bloomberg News has a good summary in this video report:

AFTER SPENDING £5 MILLION ($9.5 million) TO EQUIP all 460 ambulances with GPS finding systems, the Scottish Ambulance Service has sent a memo to the medics instructing them to not use them.  They are being told instead to use map books like they always have, because the satellite systems don’t always give the best route to where they are going.

Their “satnav” system, as they call it, is the most advanced in the UK and was launched last year amidst a wave of publicity and hoopla.  But now they are being informed:

The satellite navigation system is for guidance only. The system will guide you through the main route, which is not always necessarily the most direct or quickest possible.

The system is most effective once you are in close proximity to the address and is an aid to finding the correct location.

A map route should always be used and should be available.  The satellite navigation system is for guidance only.

The Sunday Mail, which is reporting this turnabout, offers two quotes from SAS announcements,
Last year:
‘New satnav will generate faster response times by crews’ 
Now:
‘The satnav will not always guide you through the quickest route’ 

Read the full article HERE.
Scottish Ambulance Service WEBSITE.

MICROSOFT CHAIRMAN BILL GATES SAID FRIDAY that the company will focus on developing and growing its own advertising and internet search business.

Unless you’ve been lounging on the beach for the last two weeks, you probably have heard about MS’s attempt to buy Yahoo! recently.  When the Yahoo! management rebuffed the offer (for what some observers believe was an attempt to up the ante), Microsoft withdrew the bid and publicly stated that they would no longer pursue the company.  Yahoo!’s stock price immediately dived another 8%, putting them in a more precarious financial position than they were already.

Top Tech News reports:

Analysts have been left wondering how the world’s largest software maker will increase its share of that multibillion dollar market without a major tie-up.

“We have always felt we could do very well on our own and now that’s the path we are focused on,” Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press in Jakarta on Friday.

“The standard strategy for us is to just hire great engineers and surprise people at how well we can compete, even with a company that’s got a strong lead,” he said. 

Microsoft recently bought aQuantive, an international search engine whose U. S. search market share is just 10%.  Google collects 58% of the U. S. searches while Yahoo! gathers 22%.

It appears that Microsoft is planning on capturing market share by pirating from Yahoo!

Read the full article from Top Tech News HERE.