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Dell to Sell PCs Through Retail Chain in China

BEIJING (AP) -- Dell Inc. announced a deal Monday to launch a retail presence in China by selling computers through the country's biggest chain of electronics stores as it struggles to capture a bigger share of the booming market.

The deal extends Dell's strategy of expanding beyond its traditional Internet- and phone-based sales model into retail to cope with competition from Hewlett-Packard Co. and other rivals. Dell also has targeted China with a low-cost PC unveiled in March and aimed at rural customers.

Sales will start in 50 Gome Group stores next month and expand to more stores early next year, said Michael Tatelman, vice president of marketing and sales for Dell's global consumer business.

''Our market share in China is obviously well below our global average. So we hope to be successful here and get our rightful share of the business,'' Tatelman said. ''We think this partnership gives us a platform to certainly expand our business here.''

Tatelman declined to give any sales projections.

Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, used to lead global PC sales with its lower-cost direct sales model. But since being overtaken by HP last year, Dell has started to turn to retail sales, including recent deals with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in the United States, Bic Camera Inc. in Japan and Carphone Warehouse PLC in Britain.

Dell says it has about 18 percent of China's PC market by revenue and 10 percent by number of units sold. Worldwide, its market share is 16.1 percent, according to consulting firm Gartner Group.

In China, Dell trails Beijing-based rival Lenovo Group Ltd., which bought IBM Corp.'s PC business in 2005, and Hewlett-Packard.

The new China sales plan calls for putting Dell employees in some Gome stores. The chain has about 700 outlets in 210 cities in China.

Gome already sells home computers from a wide range of brands, said Wang Junzhou, the company's executive vice president, who joined Tatelman at the news conference. He said some outlets have more than 200 different models on display.

Dell models to be sold at Gome include the XPS M1330 and Inspiron 1420 notebooks and XPS 720, Dimension 9200 and Inspiron 530 desktop, according to the company.

Dell plans to continue with its Internet and phone-based sales in China, Tatelman said. He declined to say which method was expected to be more profitable.

The low-cost basic desktop PCs designed for China that went on sale in March are priced at about $300, he said.

Gome Group is the parent company of Hong Kong-listed Gome Electrical Appliances Holding Ltd. Gome's rapid expansion has made its founder, Huang Guangyu, one of China's richest entrepreneurs, with a fortune estimated last year by Forbes magazine at $2.3 billion.

Tags:dell,china,IBM,computers

Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The early reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start next month.

Orders, however, are slow. “I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written,” said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. “And yes, it has been a disappointment.”

But Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, views the problem as a temporary one in the long-term pursuit of using technology as a new channel of learning and self-expression for children worldwide.

And he is reaching out to the public to try to give the laptop campaign a boost. The marketing program, to be announced today, is called “Give 1 Get 1,” in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399.

One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation, and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. The program will run for two weeks, with orders accepted from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26.

Just what Americans will do with the slender green-and-white laptops is uncertain. Some people may donate them to local schools or youth organizations, said Walter Bender, president of the laptop project, while others will keep them for their own family or their own use.

The machines have high-resolution screens, cameras and peer-to-peer technology so the laptops can communicate wirelessly with one another. The machine runs on free, open source software. “Everything in the machine is open to the hacker, so people can poke at it, change it and make it their own,” said Mr. Bender, a computer researcher. “Part of what we’re doing here is broadening the community of users, broadening the base of ideas and contributions, and that will be tremendously valuable.”

The machine, called the XO Laptop, was not engineered with affluent children in mind. It was intended to be inexpensive, with costs eventually approaching $100 a machine, and sturdy enough to withstand harsh conditions in rural villages. It is also extremely energy efficient, with power consumption that is 10 percent or less of a conventional laptop computer.

Staff members of the laptop project were concerned that American children might try the pared-down machines and find them lacking compared to their Apple, Hewlett-Packard or Dell laptops. Then, in this era of immediate global communications, they might post their criticisms on Web sites and blogs read around the world, damaging the reputation of the XO Laptop, the project staff worried.

So the laptop project sponsored focus-group research with American children, ages 7 to 11, at the end of August. The results were reassuringly positive. The focus-group subjects liked the fact that the machine was intended specifically for children, and appreciated features like the machine-to-machine wireless communication. “Completely beastly” was the verdict of one boy. Another environmentally conscious youngster noted that the laptop “prevents global warming.”

Still, the “Give 1 Get 1” initiative is mainly about the giving. “The real reason is to get this thing started,” Mr. Negroponte said.

He said that if, for example, donations reached $40 million, that would mean 100,000 laptops could be distributed free in the developing world. The idea, he said, would be to give perhaps 5,000 machines to 20 countries to try out and get started.

“It could trigger a lot of things,” Mr. Negroponte said.

Late last year, Mr. Negroponte said he had hoped for orders for three million laptops, but those pledges have fallen short. Orders of a million each from populous Nigeria and Brazil did not materialize.

Still, the project has had successes. Peru, for example, will buy and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year — many of them allocated for remote rural areas. Mexico and Uruguay, Mr. Negroponte noted, have made firm commitments. In a sponsorship program, the government of Italy has agreed to purchase 50,000 laptops for distribution in Ethiopia.

Each country will have different ideas about how to use the machines. Alan Kay, a computer researcher and adviser to the laptop project, said he expects one popular use will be to load textbooks at 25 cents or so each on the laptops, which has a high-resolution screen for easy reading.

“It’s probably going to be mundane in the early stages,” said Mr. Kay, who heads a nonprofit education group, whose learning software will be on the XO Laptop. “I’m an optimist that this will eventually work out,” Mr. Kay said.

Tags:Laptop,free,reviews,machine

Has Google Plans to Lay a Pacific Cable?


Google may be the ultimate do-it-yourself company. From the start, Google’s sense of its own engineering superiority, combined with a tightwad sensibility, led it to build its own servers. It writes its own operating systems.

It is now threatening to buy wireless carrier spectrum and it is getting ready to hire ships that will lay a data communications cable across the Pacific, according to a report from Communications Day, an Australian trade news service.

Google would plan to be part of a project called Unity that would also include several telecommunications companies. Unity hopes to have a cable in service by 2009, the publication wrote. It would own a dedicated portion of the multi-terabit cable, giving it a significant cost advantage for trans-Pacific data transmission over rival Internet companies.

Barry Schnitt, a Google spokesman, didn’t confirm the plan, but did tell the publication the company is interested in the area, saying, “Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.” Communications Day also noted that Google has advertised to hire people who would “be involved in new projects or investments in cable systems that Google may contemplate to extend or grow its backbone.”

Google has long been buying up data communications capacity. Its search engine works by making copies of nearly every page of the Internet in its own data centers. That requires Google move no small amount of data around the world on a regular basis. And its new plans to deliver applications over the Internet will use even more bandwidth.

Dave Burstein, the editor of DSLPrime, who tipped me off to the CommDay report, explained even though there is a lot of unused fiber capacity across the Pacific, there are few players, and prices are seen as unusually high. He adds that there is a glut of cable-aying ships, so the cost of building a new link to Asia has come down.

This new move puts Google in competition again with Verizon, which has fought Google’s approach to the new wireless spectrum auction in the United States. Verizon is part of a group of Asian carriers that is building a $500 million cable between the United States and China.

Tags:Google,Pacific,cable,United States

One Anti-Piracy System to Rule Them All

Hollywood appears to have a preliminary winner in its bake-off of anti-piracy technologies.

For the last year, the film industry, through its Palo Alto-based R&D joint venture MovieLabs, has been testing a dozen so-called “digital fingerprinting” technologies. The technology purports to scan file sharing sites, Internet providers and peer-to-peer networks to identify copyrighted material.

Yesterday in Los Angeles, people affiliated with the Motion Picture Association of America talked about the ongoing tests at a day-long anti-piracy workshop that the MPAA co-hosted with the University of California. In his introductory keynote at the event, UCLA professor and Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock showed a single slide that suggested that one of the anti-piracy filtering companies had outperformed the other 11, with the highest number of matches of infringing content and lowest number of false-positives. But professor Kleinrock and MPAA execs declined to name the participating companies or who had scored best on the test, saying that secrecy was a precondition for their participation in the tests.

Nevertheless, afterwards, executives from Santa Clara, Calif-based Vobile were crowing in the hallways of the Universal Hilton Hotel.

The two-year old company’s technology, called Video DNA, has apparently bested others from the Royal Philips Electronics, Thomson Software & Technology, and the highest profile digital fingerprinting company, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based Audible Magic, which has deals to filter video sharing sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox.

The MPAA told Business Week in the spring that Vobile was doing “very well” on the tests.

Movie Labs stress-tested the anti-piracy systems by loading hundreds of hours of copyrighted video content into the databases of the various filters, and then by flooding them with thousands of video files, some distorted, darkened and cropped, to try to scuttle their ability to find matches.

In the next phase of the ongoing tests, MovieLabs will see if the systems can handle ever larger quantities of copyrighted works. Theoretically, adding more songs, TV shows and movies in their databases could slow down these systems—and the Internet video sites that use them— since it could take longer to find possible matches.

MovieLabs has been sharing tests results with its member movie studios since the summer. MovieLabs chief executive Steve Weinstein says the technology is ready for prime time. “In a year you’re going to see many Internet companies using it. This technology has shown its viability.”

Tags:bios,tips,memory,computer science

IPhone Introduced to Europe, Where Standards Differ

LONDON, Sept. 18 — Apple introduced the iPhone to Europe on Tuesday, hoping to entice consumers with a sleek design and the power of the Apple brand, even as it flouts some of the technological and marketing conventions of the European mobile business.

Steven P. Jobs, the Apple chief executive, said the iPhone would become available to British consumers in November in an exclusive arrangement with O2, a mobile network operator owned by Telefónica of Spain. Similar deals are expected to be announced with the T-Mobile subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom in Germany and with the Orange unit of France Télécom.

The iPhone, which allows users to make calls, browse the Internet, check e-mail and play songs and videos by running their fingers over a touch-sensitive screen, has been a hit in the United States, where more than one million were sold in the first three months of its release.

But analysts say Apple may have a tougher time in Europe. They expressed disappointment that the iPhone to be sold in Europe was identical to the one in the United States, meaning that it would be unable to take advantage of faster European wireless networks for Web browsing and media downloads.

Mr. Jobs said Apple had decided against making the phone compatible with the faster third-generation mobile networks because the chip sets for 3G-compatible phones used up battery power too quickly. “They’re real power hogs,” he said in London, adding that it might take until late next year for the technology to advance enough to make a 3G iPhone.

Mr. Jobs said the iPhone would overcome this hurdle by relying heavily on Wi-Fi technology, which provides broadband Internet access for laptop computers and other devices, though only when they are stationary. When iPhones are on the move, they will shift to a mobile technology called Edge, which is also use by AT&T, Apple’s exclusive network partner in the United States.

But Matthew Key, chief executive of O2 in Britain, said Edge would be available in areas covering only about 30 percent of the British population when the phone is introduced in Britain on Nov. 9.

Also, 20 percent of British mobile users already have 3G-enabled phones, according to M:Metrics, a research firm. “There’s no doubt it’s going to be an obstacle for Apple,” said Paul Goode of M:Metrics. “You’re going to be asking people to downgrade in terms of capability.”

Apple is also going against the grain of the European mobile business by charging £269 ($538) for the phone in Britain, and locking customers in to 18-month contracts at monthly rates of £35 to £55 ($70 to $110). Typically, carriers discount even high-end cellphones in Europe.

“Sometimes you get what you pay for,” Mr. Jobs said.

O2 customers will also get unlimited data transfers with their iPhones, an effort to stimulate use of the mobile Internet and multimedia services.

T-Mobile planned to announce on Wednesday an exclusive agreement to sell the iPhone in Germany, according to a person briefed on the negotiations. There, the phone will sell for 399 euros ($555), this person added.

Carolyn Owen, a spokeswoman for Orange, declined to confirm reports that Apple would soon announce a similar agreement in France.

Europe has generally been a trickier place than the United States for Apple to do business. The company’s iPod music player has a roughly 20 percent market share in Europe, including 40 percent in Britain, compared with 60 percent in the United States, according to M:Metrics.

Regulators and consumer groups in several countries have also objected to some of Apple’s business practices.

This week, for instance, the European Commission plans hearings on a complaint that Apple’s iTunes online music store violates competition rules by charging Britons more than other Europeans for downloads. Apple has said its agreements with music companies and the organizations that oversee musical copyrights are to blame.

Despite Apple’s struggles in Europe, analysts say the region could still turn into a lucrative market for the iPhone.

Europeans, for instance, are more likely to opt for high-end multimedia phones than Americans. In June, according to M:Metrics, only 6 percent of cellphones sold in the United States were so-called smartphones, compared with 12 percent in Britain and 24 percent in Italy — a market where Apple has not yet indicated its iPhone plans.

Tags:bios,tips,memory,computer science

Google Program Enlists Mini-Sites as Selling Tool for Advertisers

Google is seizing on the popularity of widgets — small online tools that function like mini-Web sites — for its latest push into advertising.


The online giant will announce today a Gadget Ads program that will provide tools for advertisers to run widget ads in Google’s AdSense network.

Marketers can use space within these display ads on Google’s network to show videos, offer chats with celebrities, play host to games or other activities. If consumers like the widget ad, they can save it onto their desktops or on their profile pages online on sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google’s ad network.

One big advantage of the technology is that the consumer does not have to click through to a Web site. A weather widget, for example, would constantly update the weather report in a particular area. Similarly, marketers could feature content to attract consumers while constantly updating their own messages.

More than 48 percent of Internet users in the United States — over 87 million people — now use widgets, according to comScore, the online measurement company. Some of the most popular widgets on Facebook, for example, are the “Top Friends” tool, which allows people to go to their best friends’ profiles with a single click, and iLike, which lets users add music to their profiles.

“Consumers are pulling in content from multiple sources” said Christian Oestlien, a business product manager at Google who is overseeing the new ad program. “It is what we are calling the componentization of the Web. The Web is sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces.”

Many widgets have been built by media outlets, like Lucky Magazine’s shopping widget, which features hot fashion and beauty products. And some companies like Slide are developing networks of widgets made by individuals that advertisers can place ads within.

But consumer brands like Sierra Mist and Honda Civic have also been creating their own widgets as a way of providing content or tools to potential customers. Google is hoping marketers will pay to place these widgets throughout its AdSense network.

Advertisers bid for keywords to place their widget ads in Google’s network in the same way they do other Google ads. Since many users will interact with the ads within the ad units and not click through, Google has developed a new interaction measure to document the interest in the ads.

Google tested its Gadget Ads program this summer with a group of 50 marketers. To encourage more advertisers to make such ads, Google is offering to be host of videos for the ads in YouTube’s servers — a cost-saving for advertising agencies. And Google provides tools for updating the ads, even if marketers do not bid for ads in Google’s network. Marketers pay Google only for the ads that run in its networks and not for any downloading or saving of those ads that consumers may choose to do.

“We’re not trying to monetize every single event that happens in a creative,” Mr. Oestlien said, adding that they wanted advertisers “to make rich creative ads that are really useful to the end user.”

Google’s tools are convenient for ad agencies because they make it easy to create a widget quickly, said Dimitry Ioffe, chief executive of Media Banners, a division of the Visionaire Group, a digital agency based in California. Mr. Ioffe ran a widget ad for Paramount Vantage’s movie “A Mighty Heart” this summer in Google’s new program.

Mr. Ioffe said that Google’s tools to help marketers make widgets more easily may also help them cut expenses. Instead of paying news sites to run videos from a movie’s premiere, for example, studios can make it easy for consumers to post the movie videos on their own sites or social network profiles, providing free advertising.

“Widgets are a dream for marketers,” Mr. Ioffe said. “They allow them to extend their brand off of their individual sites and allow their brands to live as long as consumers want them to live.”

Tags:bios,tips,memory,computer science

Microsoft Ruling May Bode Ill for Other Companies




LUXEMBOURG, Sept. 17 — Europe’s second-highest court delivered a stinging rebuke to Microsoft Monday, but the impact of the decision upholding an earlier antitrust ruling may extend well beyond the world’s largest software maker to other high-technology companies.
Software and legal experts said the European ruling might signal problems for companies like Apple, Intel and Qualcomm, whose market dominance in online music downloads, computer chips and mobile phone technology is also being scrutinized by the European Commission.

“The decision is a strong endorsement for what in the United States would be considered aggressive policy on dominant firms,” said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. “And that’s going to continue to play out in other kinds of cases.”

The 13-member European Court of First Instance, in a starkly worded 244-page summary, reaffirmed that Microsoft had abused its market power by adding a digital media player to Windows, undercutting the early leader, Real Networks.

It also ordered Microsoft to obey a March 2004 commission order to share confidential computer code with competitors. The court also upheld the record fine levied against the company, 497.2 million euros ($689.4 million).

But the court decision comes as the center of gravity in computing is shifting away from the software for personal computers, Microsoft’s stronghold. Increasingly, the e-mailing or word-processing functions of a computer can be performed with software delivered on a Web browser. Other devices like cellphones are now used as alternates to personal computers.

The real challenge to Microsoft, after more than a decade of dominating the technology industry, is coming not from the government, but from the marketplace.

The direct impact on Microsoft is small, said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. But there may be a longer-range consequence of having Microsoft under constant, open-ended scrutiny from Europe.

“If you end up handicapping a major player in new markets, you may actually not enhance competition but hinder it, and help create new monopolies,” Mr. Yoffie said. “The obvious example is Google in Internet search and Apple in digital music.”

Indeed, the Justice Department issued a statement expressing its concerns with the European decision, saying that tough restraints on powerful companies can be harmful. Thomas O. Barnett, assistant attorney general for the department’s antitrust division, said that the effect “rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition.”

Consumer welfare, not protecting competitors, should be the guiding standard in antitrust, Mr. Barnett said.

Antitrust enforcement has often been criticized as too slow to grapple with fast-moving high-technology markets. Indeed, the media player market changed drastically during the years-long investigation in Europe. When the European Commission ordered Microsoft to offer a version of Windows in Europe without its media player, but at no difference in price, few people wanted the stripped-down version of Windows.

Still, the Luxembourg court’s ruling poses a threat to Microsoft’s traditional way of doing business by bundling new features and products into its Windows operating system. The court decision sets a precedent, at least from Europe. For example, if Microsoft wants to put handwriting- and speech-recognition features or stronger security software into Windows, European authorities might listen to competitors’ complaints.

In the United States, the Justice Department chose to settle the Microsoft antitrust case in 2001 without challenging the company’s freedom to put whatever it wants in its operating system.

Microsoft’s allies said the court’s decision would have a chilling effect on the business strategies of many global technology companies.

“This ruling is certainly going to introduce a lot of uncertainty,” said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, a Washington-based group that supported Microsoft in its legal case in Europe. “What the court is basically saying is that if you develop a successful product and get too big, the European Commission is going to force you to give away your intellectual property.”

The European ruling’s widest impact on technology companies, legal and industry experts say, will probably be on Microsoft’s ability to guard some of its intellectual property in software for servers. Server software, running on data center computers, powers corporate networks and the Web.

The court upheld the commission’s order that Microsoft must share technical information with competitors so their server software works smoothly with Microsoft’s Windows desktop.

The order applies only to Europe, but Microsoft may have a difficult time containing the impact to the European market only.

Because the Internet runs on server software, industry analysts say the court’s ruling could have a lasting impact.

“The Internet has opened a really good door for the industry and society to walk through to enjoy a far more rapid pace of innovation and growth than in personal computing, where Microsoft controls things,” said Timothy F. Bresnahan, an economist at Stanford University and a senior official in the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the Clinton administration. “Europe is pushing to ensure that the higher pace of innovation on the server is allowed to continue.”

Bradford L. Smith, the general counsel for Microsoft, who was present for the reading, said the company would follow the ruling but did not say specifically whether the company would appeal it. In a statement issued by the company, Mr. Smith said: “I would note that a lot has changed since this case started in 1998. The world has changed, the industry has changed, and our company has changed.”

The decision followed a five-day hearing on the issues under appeal in April 2006. Microsoft had indicated in the past that it would appeal any negative ruling to the European Court of Justice, the highest court in Europe. But an appeal by the company, a process likely to take at least two years, would focus only on whether the appellate court erred in procedure and points of law in reaching its decision, not on the facts in the case.

Neelie Kroes, the European Union competition commissioner, said at a news conference in Brussels that while the decision set an “important precedent,” the judgment “is bittersweet because the court has confirmed the commission’s view that consumers are suffering at the hands of Microsoft.”

In the course of the case, which began with a complaint in 1998, Ms. Kroes noted that Microsoft’s share of the market in server software has risen sharply and that Windows Media Player has come to dominate the market.

She highlighted the fact that Microsoft has 95 percent of the world market for desktop operating systems and said she would like to see this shrink. “You can’t draw a line and say exactly 50 percent is correct, but a significant drop in market share is what we would like to see,” she said. “Microsoft cannot regulate the market by imposing its products and its services on people.”

Tags:bios,tips,memory,computer science

It identifies errors in the PC through the Sounds of the BIOS, the Beeps celebrities!

The staff has many doubts to interpret beeps of that the computer makes when initiating, either normal it or some error




Below apresneto one lists with beeps, the problem and I diagnosis

It When the Windows is twirling, is easy to identify errors. But what to make when the PC it does not arrive nor to initiate? For cases as this, it has sonorous messages, a set of bips short and long that make possible the diagnosis of a same problem if the plate of video not to function.

These sounds are generated by the BIOS, an internal program of the plate-mother who always makes the verification of the hardware that the machine is on. If something will be missed, you is knowing in the hour. A time that has a BIOS manufacturer more than, the messages can be different of a computer for another one. Here you confer the more common sonorous messages of the BIOS of the Award and the AMI, most used in Brazil.

BIOS Award

Problem: the machine does not initiate and you hear a long beeper after to bind the Disgnostic hardware: the error indicates that it has a memory problem RAM. Recommendation: it opens the computer, it removes the memories and pass a soft brush to eliminate the dust of the sockets. Recoloque the combs and verifies if the problem was solved. In case that the error persists, it changes to the memory combs RAM.

Problem: the short machine does not initiate and you hear a long beeper followed by two bips Diagnosis: problem with the video plate Recommendation: it opens the computer, it takes off the plate and pass a soft brush to remove the dust of slot. Recoloque it and it verifies if the problem was solved. In case that the error persists, it substitutes the video plate.

Problem: the short machine does not initiate and you hear a long beeper followed by three bips Diagnosis: problem with the video plate Recommendation: the same one of the previous case. Problem: the machine stops in the high and low continuous initiation and you it hears bips Diagnosis: problem with the processing Recommendation: it enters in the BIOS and it verifies if the processor is configured correctly. If the problem to persist, substitutes the processor.

Problem: the machine functions normally, but you hear bips low continuous Disgnostic: problem of heating of the processing Recommendation: it opens the computer and it verifies if cooler is turning correctly. If necessary, it substitutes the component. It also uses to advantage to add a little of thermal folder between the processor and the spendthrift of heat. These folders easily are found in store specialized in computer science.

BIOS AMI

Problem: the machine does not initiate and you hear a short beeper, three bips short or a long beeper and three short ones.

Diagnosis: memory problem
Recommendation: it opens the computer, it removes the memories and pass a soft brush to remove the dust of the sockets. Recoloque the combs and verifies if the problem was solved. In case that the error persists, it changes to the memory combs RAM. But as reference, a beeper means error of refresh, three bips na means error memory RAM below of 64 KB and a long bit and three short ones mean error na memory RAM above of 64 KB.

Problem: short the two computer does not initiate and you hear bips Diagnosis: error of memory parity Recommendation: you probably have two or more incompatible combs of memory. He opens the computer, he removes all the combs and he has tested them, one by one, until finding the comb incompatible.

Problem: the short PC does not initiate and you hear five bips Diagnosis: error in the processing Recommendation: it enters in the BIOS and it verifies if the processor is configured correctly. If the problem to persist, substitutes chip.

Problem: short the 11 machine does not initiate and you hear bips Diagnosis: cache L2 fails in the memory Recommendation: it substitutes the plate-mother.

Problem: the machine does not initiate and you hear short two a long beeper followed of bips Diagnosis: problem with the video plate
Recommendation: it opens the computer, it takes off the plate of video and pass a soft brush to remove the dust of slot. Recoloque the video plate and verifies if the problem was solved. In case that the error persists, it substitutes the plate.

Tags:bios,tips,memory,computer science

In Bush Speech, Signs of Split on Iran Policy

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — While scrutiny this week focused on the debate over troop strength, President Bush also used the occasion to turn up the pressure on Iran, using his speech on Thursday to stress the need to contain Iran as a major reason for the continued American presence in Iraq.

The language in Mr. Bush’s speech reflected an intense and continuing struggle between factions within his administration over how aggressively to confront Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been arguing for a continuation of a diplomatic approach, while officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office have advocated a much tougher view. They seek to isolate and contain Iran, and to include greater consideration of a military strike.

Mr. Bush’s language indicated that the debate, at least for now, might have tilted toward Mr. Cheney. By portraying the battle with Iran as one for supremacy in the Middle East, Mr. Bush turned up the language another, more bellicose, notch. “If we were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened,” Mr. Bush said. “Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region.”

The debate between the factions in the administration will play out soon in other ways, including the decision over whether to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, or a unit of it, a terrorist organization and subject to increased financial sanctions.

The tensions between Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney have existed for a long time; they began during the administration’s first term, when, as national security adviser, she had to mediate turf battles between a coalition of Mr. Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, and Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state.

Now, as secretary of state, Ms. Rice has increasingly come to reflect the more diplomatic view advocated by the State Department, which has pushed for a more restrained tone in America’s dealings with the world in general, and Iran in particular.

Mr. Cheney and hawks in his office, however, have become increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of progress in curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Allies of Mr. Cheney continue to say publicly that the United States should include a change in Iran’s leadership as a viable policy option, and have argued, privately, that the United States should encourage Israel to consider a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The testimony this week of Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, that the diplomatic talks with Iran have done little to restrain what he called Iran’s “malign” influence in Iraq, also fueled the disquiet in Mr. Cheney’s office, one administration official said.

That is intensifying the debate over the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

While some White House officials and some members of the vice president’s staff have been pushing to blacklist the entire Revolutionary Guard, administration officials said, officials at the State and Treasury Departments have been pushing a narrower approach that would list only the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, or perhaps, only companies and organizations with financial ties to that group.

The designation would make it easier for the United States to block financial accounts and other assets controlled by the group.

The administration is still pressing ahead with other efforts to turn up the pressure on Iran. The State Department has asked top officials from the five other world powers seeking to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions to come to Washington on Friday for a meeting in which R. Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, will press for stronger United Nations sanctions against Iran.

On Sept. 28, Ms. Rice will meet with her counterparts from Europe, Russia and China to discuss the Iran sanctions issue.

Beyond its nuclear program, Iran has emerged as an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration, American officials said, by inflaming the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza, where it has provided military and financial support to the militant Islamic group Hamas.

In its report to Congress on Friday, the administration accused Iran of providing Shiite militias with training, money and weapons, including rockets, mortars and explosively formed projectiles, which the administration said accounted for an increased percentage of American combat deaths. The report said that “coalition and Iraqi operations against these groups, combined with a growing rejection of Shia violence by top government of Iraq officials, has led to some progress in reducing violent attacks from Shia extremists.”

The American military in Iraq still has custody of several Iranian officials who were detained there on suspicion of involvement in providing aid to Shiite militias.

Iran’s government has denied the charges. Its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Friday that Mr. Bush’s Middle East policies had failed and that Mr. Bush would one day be put on trial for the “tragedies” he had created in Iraq.

But a belief has been growing in Iran, which administration officials have pointedly not tried to stem, that the Bush administration was considering military strikes against Iran. An Israeli airstrike in Syria last week kicked up speculation in the Iranian press that Israel, in alliance with the United States, was really trying to send a message to Iran that it could strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it chose to.

“If I were the Iranians, what I’d be freaked out about is that the other Arab states didn’t protest” the airstrike, said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The Arab world nonreaction is a signal to Iran, that Arabs aren’t happy with Iran’s power and influence, so if the Israelis want to go and intimidate and violate the airspace of another Arab state that’s an ally of Iran, the other Arab states aren’t going to do anything.”

During the talks next week, the United States, France and Britain will try to get Russia, China and Germany to sign on to a stronger set of United Nations Security Council sanctions against members of Iran’s government.

The sanctions are aimed at getting Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium. The international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been complicated by America’s conflict with Iran in Iraq, which Russia and some European countries argue should take a back seat to the nuclear issue.

Further complicating things has been a dispute over a pact reached last month between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency for Iran to answer questions about an array of suspicious past nuclear activities.

Gregory L. Schulte, the American delegate to the agency, suggested that Tehran “has no intention of coming clean.”
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Microsoft and Accenture sign contract of outsourcing of USS 185 million dollar

The Microsoft this week deepened its partnership with the Accenture by means of the signature of an agreement of outsourcing of seven years in the total of 185 million dólare, that he encloses services of finances, accounting and of purchases that can be to become a case notable for applications ERP of the Microsoft. The Accenture plans to house a number of services in the platform Dynamics AX ERP, of the Microsoft, whom it offers has reported, statisticians and capacities of budget and forecasts. The AX also combines with the component of business intelligence of the SQL Server, the SharePoint Server and the server of infrastructure messages Exchange, among others serving of the Microsoft. The financial services and of accounting, according to Accenture, go to allow the Microsoft to cover payable accounts, trips and expenditures and functions of have reported, including resources, general accounting, treasure-house fixed and have reported of status. These services today are spread between contracts that the Microsoft has of some offered services. For example, in the contract of the Microsoft with the American Express for services of trips. The development - so far about 30% he is complete - goes to cover the offices of the Microsoft in 92 countries around of the globe and can be offered in 36 languages by means of the Global Delivery Network, of the Accenture.

Contract goes to center services of the Microsoft and could be offered in 92 countries thanks to the capillarity of the Accenture.

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` Ciber vagrancy ' in the work grows in Brazil

To each week, the Brazilians spend 5,9 hours sailing in personal sites during the work. The number comes of the research carried through for the Websense to mapear the behavior of the InterNet users. 400 employees of companies based on Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico had been interviewed. The number is almost three times the average divulged for the company in 2005: 2.1 hours. In September of 2006, the research pointed the index of 4,7 used hours with respect to ends not-professionals. Visits the news, financial sites, accounts of personal email, blogs and use of instantaneous communicator to talk with friends are activities that if fit in "the not professional" territory, in accordance with the research. The average of "lost time" in the four searched Latin American countries was of 7,3 hours per week. Mexico appears with biggest "wastefulness", with average of 9,6 hours, and Chile presents index of five hours.

Change of habit

The financial sites had monopolized the attention of the Brazilians in the navigation for content not related to the work. The subject economy, including pages of banks, represented 76% of accesses - 20% than in 2006 more. Fernando Fontão, executive of the Websense, says that the increase of traffic in financial sites is justified by the praticidade of the services. "He is faster to pay accounts for the InterNet of that to face line of the bank", affirms. The sites of notice had fallen for as the place. In 2006 they were responsible for 74% of the accesses, index that fell for 40% in 2007. In third place they continue the sites of personal email, with 32% of the preference. The visits blogs had grown of 4% for 14%, tying up to with the use of VoIP communicators (voice on IP), as the Skype.

Unsafe company

Beyond the possible risk to the productivity in the work, the alert Websense for the security of the companies, who can be victims of the personal navigation of its employees. Sigilosas information of a company, for example, can leak for e-mails personal and cause damages - accidentally or not. But the limit enters the rights of the employee and the duties of the company nor always are clearly. Adauto de Mello Junior, senior director of vendas of the Websense for Latin America, admits that "the mixed staff and professional are each time more". 100 people in each country had been interviewed, being 50 users and 50 controlling of Technology of the Information. The Websense says that the answers had been spontaneous and they had not involved monitoramento.


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Google Founders’ Ultimate Perk: A NASA Runway




SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 12 — In the annals of perks enjoyed by America’s corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes’ drive from their offices.

For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft.

It is a perk that is likely to turn other Silicon Valley tycoons green with envy, as no other private jets have landing rights there. But it may not sit well with a community that generally considers itself proud to have Google in its midst.

How did the two billionaires get such a coveted parking place for the jet, which is unusually large and rare by private jet standards? Officials at the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the agency signed a unique agreement last month that allows it to place scientific instruments and researchers on planes used by the Google founders. NASA gets to collect scientific data on some flights of those jets, which in addition to the Boeing 767-200 includes two Gulfstream Vs.

“It was an opportunity for us to defray some of the fixed costs we have to maintain the airfield as well as to have flights of opportunity for our science missions,” said Steven Zornetzer, associate director for institutions and research at the Ames Center. “It seemed like a win-win situation.”

NASA said it had already run one mission on one Gulfstream V, to observe the Aurigid meteor shower on Aug. 31.

Moffett Field is nearly adjacent to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and the four-mile drive between the two locations takes just seven minutes, according to Google Maps. Other Silicon Valley executives have to fight traffic to get to their large jets parked at the San Francisco or San Jose international airports or even farther away.

Two private aviation industry executives said that parking two Gulfstream Vs at San Francisco or San Jose airports would cost $240,000 to $360,000 a year, or more, depending on the parking location and the amount of fuel purchased. As for the Boeing, one of the executives, who asked not to be identified because his wealthy clients insist on privacy, said that most private jet facilities at large airports are not equipped to take in a jet that big. “It’s like if you lived in a condo and decided to own a semi,” he said.

The agreement is raising questions from local officials and community activists, who have a long history of opposing the expansion of flights at Moffett Field, a historic airport that was once under the supervision of the United States Navy, but was transferred to NASA in 1994.

“The Google flights represent the possibility that the camel’s nose is under the tent, and that NASA is looking at opening up the use of the runways to help pay for it,” said Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center, a local nonprofit group that over the years has opposed proposed expansions of civilian flights at Moffett Field. “The majority of the people in the community are against that.”

Mr. Siegel said he was hoping NASA would provide clear answers about the agreement. “If they are doing science missions, that’s O.K.,” Mr. Siegel said. “If they are doing it just because they are rich and popular, it is not O.K.”

Google and Ames Research Center have agreements to collaborate on research, as well as a preliminary plan for Google to build as much as a million square feet of space at Ames. The deal for the planes, which are not owned by Google, was unrelated to the Google agreements, Mr. Zornetzer said. It was signed with H211, a limited liability corporation that counts Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, as one of its principals. The ownership of the planes is held by other affiliated companies.

Google, for its part, said that this is a personal matter involving the founders, who were not available to comment. Ken Ambrose, whom NASA identified as a representative of H211, did not return calls seeking comment.

“This is not a new issue,” said Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democrat, whose district includes Moffett Field. “You have to live with your neighbors. You are not out in the middle of the desert. You are in the heart of Silicon Valley.”

The planes’ presence at Moffett Field was first reported last week by the technology gossip blog Valleywag. Some details of the agreement were reported Wednesday in The San Francisco Chronicle and The Palo Alto Daily News.

The Google founders’ jet has been the talk of Silicon Valley since 2005, when the pair purchased the plane, which in a normal configuration can hold 180 passengers.

A year later, attention on the plane intensified after The Wall Street Journal wrote about a legal dispute between the owners and a contractor who was hired to refurbish it. In the article, the contractor described requests for modifying the plane to include California king-size beds for the founders. At one point, the founders asked whether hammocks could be hung from the ceiling. The contractor said that Mr. Schmidt had described the jet as “party airplane.”

The extravagance of the plane stands in contrast to the low-key image cut by Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, whose lifestyle is less flashy than that of other Silicon Valley billionaires. They have been intensely private about the plane as they have been about all details of their private lives. Ever since the Navy decided to close operations at Moffett Field in the early 1990s, local communities have been opposed to expanding the airport’s use. In 1992, in nonbinding votes in Mountain View and Sunnyvale, voters overwhelmingly rejected the idea of opening up Moffett Field to general aviation. A plan to open the field to air cargo companies like FedEx and U.P.S. was rejected in the late 1990s, in part because of community opposition.

Mr. Zornetzer said NASA was not expecting the deal to create a large number of new flights at Moffett. While two other private parties — a helicopter operator and Lockheed Martin — are allowed to use the airfield, none of those agreements cover flights of private jets. NASA said it had no agreements allowing private jets to land at any of its other facilities. As news of the jet’s presence at Moffett Field spread, private jet owners and operators have begun coveting the airfield.

“Everyone who operates private jets or owns them has been eyeing that gorgeous runway eager to take off from there,” said Nicholas Solinger, chief strategy officer for Xojet, a private aviation company. Mr. Solinger said Moffett was far better situated for most Silicon Valley executives than the airports at San Jose and San Francisco. “People will now redouble their efforts to get access to that airfield,” he said.

The Geography of Religious Experience



THE greenish hue that tinted the air over the Van Hoevenberg Trail to Mount Marcy, in the Adirondack High Peaks of New York, seemed to emanate from the balsams or the feldspar-mottled creek bed. The morning was cool and clear, the black flies stunned by the previous night's 30-something temperatures. When I stepped out onto the ledges above Indian Falls, where I had walked many times before, an indefinable feeling out of nowhere stopped me in my tracks, disorienting me in time — if not in geography.

It wasn't altitude or nostalgia. Maybe it was the view of the dew-streaked slides on Algonquin and Wright Peaks across the valley, or the combination of chill air and warm sun typical of the High Peaks in late June. Perhaps it was just the full pack I had carried four and a half miles up the hill from Adirondak Loj, a rustic lodge at Heart Lake, and the fact that I wasn't getting any younger.

William James, the American philosopher and brother of the novelist Henry James, following the same route on July 7, 1898, probably labored under a similar combination of suggestion and endorphins. He was 56, two years younger than I was now, and carried 18 pounds — half my load. He, too, started from the Adirondak Loj (though the name of the building that stood there in his day was spelled more conventionally as Adirondack Lodge), and he ended that day in Panther Gorge, on the southeast side of Marcy, by having the kind of transformative experience that his most influential book, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” put forward as the basis of genuine spiritual phenomena.

I first read “The Varieties,” which was made up of a series of lectures James later gave in Edinburgh, when I was managing a fishing club deep in the central Adirondacks in the late 1970s. I was drawn by the book's title and the debt it was said to have to Emerson and Whitman. Of James I knew little — certainly nothing of his Adirondack connection. My own experience in nature had made me curious as to how places as much as cultures could produce distinctive expressions of thought and art. “All experiences have their conditions,” James wrote in another book, “Essays in Radical Empiricism.” On that day in 1898, factors besides mountain air and exertion had conditioned his. He had been reading the journals of George Fox, founder of the Quakers, who wrote of having spontaneous “openings,” or spiritual illuminations. And a few days earlier James — who had frequent crushes — had mailed a letter to Pauline Goldmark, a 24-year-old Bryn Mawr graduate across the mountains in Keene Valley, where they had met, suggesting she hike into Panther Gorge with her brother and some friends. There he would meet them, and the next day they would hike back out to Keene Valley, where James, a professor at Harvard, shared a rustic retreat, Putnam Camp, with other Boston intellectuals.

Pauline Goldmark, who later was a social reformer and a sister-in-law of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, was an enthusiastic hiker — what James called an “up at sunrise, out-of-doors, mountaintop kind of girl.” Over a three-year correspondence with James, she had come to embody his romantic, idealized and eroticized projection of the Adirondacks, but there is absolutely no evidence that theirs was anything more than a platonic friendship. (The erotic undercurrent surrounding ideas of nature and camp life in those days is wonderfully evoked in George Prochnik's recent book, “Putnam Camp.”)

Above everything else loomed the talks that James had been asked to deliver at the University of Edinburgh, the Gifford Lectures. He had come to the Adirondacks to escape the demands of Cambridge and his family as he pondered the lectures. With them he hoped to cement his reputation — and that of American philosophy — and demonstrate his belief that the psychological and philosophical study of religion should focus on the direct personal experience of numinousness, or union with something “beyond,” rather than on creeds and ecclesiastical institutions. But he had been stumped on how to frame them.

By including Pauline Goldmark on the Panther Gorge trip, even for a presumably chaste rendezvous, it seems James was priming himself for a breakthrough. His own life experience — the influence of a mystical father, a tendency toward melancholy, earlier experiments with cannabis and mescaline — further conditioned him for some kind of epiphany.

On July 7, he left the lodge at 7 a.m. with a guide and passed over the cribwork structure at Marcy Dam, with its imposing view of Avalanche Pass. (In a rebuilt version, the dam is still there, and it's one of the busiest spots in the High Peaks.) By noon, James and his guide had made the Marcy summit, some seven miles from Heart Lake, and James met two acquaintances from Cambridge — “Appalachians,” as he called them — who had hiked up from Keene Valley, on the northeast side of Marcy. Possibly they discussed the recent American invasion of Cuba and the destruction of the Spanish fleet, which had dominated the news for weeks. They may have lingered, as hikers inevitably do today, over the operatic views of other Adirondack peaks and of the far upper reaches of the Boreas River to the south and the Cold River to the west. It wasn't until 4 p.m. that James began climbing down the southwest flank into Panther Gorge.

At 2,100 feet below the summit, Panther Gorge lies between Marcy, at 5,344 feet the highest peak in New York, and Haystack, the third-highest (Algonquin Peak, near Lake Placid, is No. 2). It is among the most remote destinations in the Eastern High Peaks Wilderness, known for capricious weather and forbidding terrain that frequently swallow rash or unlucky skiers and hikers.

The steep descent takes an hour or two, and James arrived in the bottom of the gorge, at the rough cabin that stood there then, to find Pauline Goldmark; her brother, Charles; Waldo Adler, the son of Felix Adler, founder of the Society for Ethical Culture; and two college girls “drest in boy's breeches,” as he couldn't help writing to his wife. It had been a rough, nearly 10-mile day, beginning for James at 5 a.m.

The guide made dinner and built a cozy fire inside. But that night James tossed and turned while his other youthful cabin mates slumbered. He told his wife, Alice, in the extraordinary letter he wrote her two days later, that he arose and walked out to the brook that drains the gorge. And then something happened to him.

“The moon rose and hung above the scene, leaving a few of the larger stars visible,” he wrote, “and I entered into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me, especially the good Pauline, the thought of you and the children ... the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis nacht.” (Walpurgisnacht is the night before May Day, when spirits walked the earth, according to Germanic lore.)

However deep and meaningful the feeling, he couldn't really explain it — as he later showed others had been unable to explain their own similar experiences. “It seemed as if all the gods of the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral gods of the inner life,” he wrote to his wife. But it was a turning point in his intellectually peripatetic life. After that night at Panther Gorge, he understood spiritual reality not as a concept, or as something privileged, but as an unexceptional property of human consciousness and a fact of life.

Molding the Ideal Islamic Citizen



THE instructor held up an unfurled green condom as she lectured a dozen brides-to-be on details of family planning. But birth control was only one aspect of the class, provided by the government and mandatory for all couples before marriage. The other was about sex, and the message from the state was that women should enjoy themselves as much as men and that men needed to be patient, because women need more time to become aroused.

This is not the picture of Iran that filters out across the world, amid images of women draped in the forbidding black chador, or of clerics in turbans. But it is just as much a part of the complex social and political mix of Iranian society — and of the state’s continuing struggle, now three decades old, to shape the identity of its people.

In Iran, pleasure-loving Persian culture and traditions blend and conflict with the teachings of Shiite Islam, as well as more than a dozen other ethnic and tribal heritages. Sex education here is not new, but the message has been updated recently to help young people enjoy each other and, the Islamic state hopes, strengthen their marriages in a time when everyday life in Iran is stressful enough. The emphasis on sexual pleasure, not just health, was recognition that something was not right in the Islamic Republic.

Such flexibility is one way the government shapes, or is shaped by, society’s attitudes and behavior. These days, however, its use is an exception. The current government has become far better known for employing the opposite strategy: insisting that society and individuals bend to its demands and to its chosen definition of what it is to be a citizen of Iran.

In fact, both tools remain part of a larger goal: securing the Islamic Republic by remolding people’s own definitions of themselves. In that way, the strategy resembles the failed effort in the Soviet Union to build a national identity — the New Soviet Man — that was based on its own criteria. The Communists used youth camps and raw terror; anyone challenging that identity, which in their case was atheistic, was seen as challenging the state.

Since 1979, the clerics of Iran have tried to forge a new national identity based primarily on a marriage of Shiite Islamic teachings with a revolutionary ideology. Initially, some leaders tried to dilute the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian traditions. But that effort proved impossible and has largely been abandoned.

Other Iranian governments since the 1979 revolution have also tried to adapt to the realities of modernity, but those efforts did not last. President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani tried to open the state-controlled economy, and President Mohammad Khatami tried to ease the strict controls on dress, public behavior and free speech.

Both those efforts have been rolled back. Rather than rest comfortably on the reality that the Islamic Republic and its institutions have survived for three decades, hard-line leaders still seem to be afraid that the system is vulnerable. And so their struggle continues.

“From one president to another the whole orientation of the country changes,” said a prominent political scientist in Tehran who, in the current climate of fear, agreed to speak only if he remained anonymous. “Why? Because we do not have a consensus on who we are or where we are going.”

He added: “We can easily conclude that the ideological revolutionary order is an elite occupation, rather than a mass occupation.”

For the generation born after the revolution, religion has been mandatory, no longer revolutionary. Before then, a woman wore an Islamic covering or hijab, for example, as an act of rebellion. For this generation, the head scarf is an obligation, and taking it off is viewed as a challenge to the state.

“Kids born after the revolution are now much less religious than those born before the revolution,” said Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who was a vice president in the reformist Khatami government. “Those born before, or even during the revolution, their beliefs were voluntary.”

For eight years, Mr. Abtahi worked beside President Khatami in trying to lower the temperature of the government’s rhetoric while allowing a small increase in social freedoms, intended as a salve for a young population. The people in charge now say that the Khatami years threatened to destabilize the system.

But Mr. Abtahi smiles, a smile of redemption, and referred to the realities of human nature. “We have not been in power for two years, ” he said. “There should not be a single prostitute, there should not be a single bad hijab, not a single gay person. Two years have passed since they came to power, and we see their battle has intensified.”

To force or to persuade. Mr. Abtahi and like-minded supporters of the Islamic system want to see the masses persuaded because force, they believe, just pushes people away. “Naturally, in any religious government, if there is more pressure, it does not make people more religious,” Mr. Abtahi said.

Iran is full of surprises. Life moves on for most people, as they find a way to accommodate to the pressure to conform. Take a walk through northern Tehran, which is more Western-oriented and less religious than other areas. Women wear their head scarves, but continue to push them way back. Young men spike their hair with gel. All signs of rebellion, all sharply criticized by the government.

Book City, a three-story shop, is still open. The tables are piled high with self-help books. Mehdi Tavakoli, who works there, said the best-selling titles include “Life, Meditation and Self-Knowing” and “The Play of Life and How to Play It.”

Mr. Tavakoli said that the government tried to stop publication of some self-help books, but that the genre proved so popular, publishers just reissued old editions. Many books promote spiritual and personal awakening through meditation, and through ideas with roots in India — practices that do not mesh with the leaders’ idea of a good Islamic citizen.

In this climate, the official talk is of conformity, not individual self-discovery. There is interest, for example, in building an Islamic bicycle for women, a boxy contraption that hides a woman’s lower body, a scheme that has provided comic relief to those who are depressed by the recent social crackdown.

Emad Afrough, a conservative member of Parliament, sees the current repression as a reminder that the Islamic Republic is still a new state, that its formula of religious government is a first, and that it is still trying to find the balance between society’s needs and the individual’s.

He says the Khatami government did not pay enough attention to individual responsibility to society. Now, he says, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not paying enough attention to individual rights. The few exceptions like the sex education class illustrate the challenge of finding the middle ground that Mr. Afrough says is needed. “We have to learn to balance individual rights with social rights, individual responsibilities with social responsibilities,” he said. “We are at the beginning of this road.”

German Police Arrest 3 in Terrorist Plot


FRANKFURT, Sept. 5 — German authorities said Wednesday that they had stopped a major terrorist attack against American and German targets in this country, arresting three Islamic militants and seizing a large amount of potentially explosive chemicals and military-grade detonators.

Those arrested — two German citizens who had converted to Islam and a Turkish resident of Germany — were in the advanced stages of plotting bomb attacks that could have been deadlier than those that killed dozens in London and Madrid, the police and security officials said. At least five lesser figures are still being pursued, they said.

“They were planning massive attacks,” the German federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, said at a news conference, outlining an intensive six-month investigation. She said the suspects had amassed hydrogen peroxide, the main chemical in the explosives used in the London suicide bombings of July 2005.

For months, Germany has been warning of a likely terrorist attack, and the government has been contemplating tightening surveillance and enforcement tactics that are now looser than elsewhere in Europe, in part because of Germany’s troubled 20th-century history.

Although officials spoke with confidence of the attack’s imminence and seriousness, they did not make fully clear the basis of their assertions. Europe has been the site of a number of devastating terrorist plots, but some have turned out later to be less than met the eye when announced.

If the announced details hold up under scrutiny, it means that Germany, like Britain, has become a target for sophisticated homegrown terrorism, and the case will fan the debate over the balance between civil liberties and public security. Previous German plots have been far smaller, masterminded by foreigners, or focused outside of Germany, like the 9/11 attacks, which were hatched in Hamburg.

An American intelligence official said that the United States helped German authorities track the location of two of the German suspects by eavesdropping on their cellphone conversations as they moved out of training camps in Pakistan.

Ms. Harms also said that the two German converts had trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan and that the three suspects had about 1,500 pounds of hydrogen peroxide, which they were preparing to move by van when arrested in an out-of-the-way village in western Germany on Tuesday afternoon. Security authorities in Europe have warned for some years that radical converts could pose a keen risk since they blend in easily to mainstream society.

The Turkish links in this case also trouble counterterrorism experts, who note that Germany has generally not had to contend with a radical element in its large Turkish Muslim minority.

“This is the first time I’ve seen a Turkish-German network,” said Guido Steinberg, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. “And the fact that it is connected to a Turkish network in Pakistan is an even bigger problem.”

While the suspects were homegrown, the targets the authorities said they intended to attack were symbols of the enduring American presence in Germany.

Information that surfaced during the investigation, which included monitoring phone calls and tracking suspects’ movements, led the authorities to conclude that among the targets under consideration were the Ramstein Air Base, a crucial transportation hub for the American military, and Frankfurt International Airport.

The 12 vats of hydrogen peroxide collected by the suspects, when mixed with other chemicals, could produce a bomb with a force equal to 1,200 pounds of TNT, officials said.

“This would have enabled them to make bombs with more explosive power than the ones used in the London and Madrid bombings,” said Jörg Ziercke, head of the German Federal Crime Office.

Mr. Ziercke said the men belonged to a terrorist group that the police suspected of having close ties to Al Qaeda, though he did not offer evidence of those links. Counterterrorism experts here expressed wariness, noting that in almost every major attack or suspected plot since 9/11, the role of Al Qaeda has been raised but rarely substantiated.

Nevertheless, the German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, said on state television, “There was an imminent security threat.” And some officials said the attacks could have come within days, noting that the German Parliament will soon take up a politically fraught debate about extending the deployment of German troops in Afghanistan. Next week is also the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

German officials were visibly relieved by the arrests — the fruits of an elaborate investigation involving more than 300 people. On Wednesday, police officers raided 41 houses and apartments across Germany, seizing computers and other evidence.

German special forces police officers escorting a suspect from the German Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe today.
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Wolfgang Ratta/Reuters

One of the suspects, left, with German special police officers today.

But some politicians warned that the danger remained high. “The arrests yesterday are just evidence of how serious the situation here in Germany is,” said Wolfgang Bosbach, a prominent legislator in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party.

The surveillance was so close that in July, officials said, the police managed to swap some of the tanks of hydrogen peroxide the suspects had gathered with tanks of a far lesser concentration.

One of the suspects, whom police sources identified as Fritz Gelowicz, a 28-year-old German born in Munich, was detained in 2005 in a raid in a Muslim neighborhood in Bavaria. He was put under surveillance again in December 2006, after he was seen scouting an American military barracks in Hanau, according to court documents.

The police are investigating a German-Turkish man, an associate of Mr. Gelowicz’s and also a suspect in the plot, two security officials said. They said he was believed to be in Turkey.

Tuesday’s arrests were made at a vacation home in Oberschledorn, a village of 800 tucked into the hills, 75 miles north of Frankfurt. The suspects had rented the house to store chemicals to make explosives, officials said. They were preparing to leave when the police swooped in.

One of the three men fled and, in a scuffle with a police officer, wrested a pistol from his holster and shot him in the hand before he was subdued, officials said.

A few had seen three young men walking through the village in recent days, but they did not arouse suspicion. Curinna Imuhl, 12, who lives near the rented house, said, “I thought no one was there; the shades were always down.”

On Tuesday, the Danish police arrested eight people in a suspected terrorist plot. The German interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, said there was no evidence of a direct link between the plots. Six of those suspects have already been released.

Ms. Harms, the federal prosecutor, said the three suspects arrested Tuesday belonged to a German cell of the Islamic Jihad Union, a radical Sunni group based in Central Asia that split from the extremist Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

While this group has not been linked to terrorist attacks in Europe, it has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in July 2004 near the United States and Israeli Embassies in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. The group has called for the overthrow of the secular government in Uzbekistan.

German officials have warned that the country was under threat of a terrorist attack because of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan. They said they were particularly worried by reports of Germans taking part in terrorist training camps in Pakistan and returning to Germany to carry out attacks.

In Berlin, Chancellor Merkel said, “The lesson from this is the danger is not just abstract, it’s real.” The consequences of an attack, she added, would have been “indescribable.”

Mr. Ziercke said the United States aided German authorities. Another security official said the Americans tipped off the Germans to the existence of the Islamic Jihad Union.

President Bush, who is in Australia, was briefed on the arrests, said Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

American officials, who have spoken publicly about Al Qaeda’s growing abilities to attack Western targets, say the group in Germany is likely to have ties to Al Qaeda’s operational figures in Pakistan. American spy agencies believe that Qaeda’s leaders have established a haven in Pakistan, where they have set up small compounds to train operatives for attacks on Western targets.

American military officials said the Germans contacted them on Tuesday evening to warn them about the plot. “This was a German-led investigation,” said Lt. Cmdr. Corey Barker, a spokesman for the United States European Command in Stuttgart. “We do appreciate their commitment to safeguarding us against a terrorist attack.”

Ramstein is the largest American air base in Germany and a hub for troops deploying to Eastern Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan. Commander Barker said the base had not lifted its force protection level, which is now at the second highest designation.

Frankfurt’s airport, the second busiest on the Continent, after Charles de Gaulle in Paris, was operating normally, an airport spokesman said.

Germany narrowly missed a smaller terrorist attack in July 2006, when two suitcase bombs left on commuter trains in Cologne failed to explode. Officials said the two suspects in that attack, from Lebanon, had a fraction of the bomb-making chemicals amassed for this latest plot.

In June, Mr. Schäuble and his deputy, August Hanning, warned that the terrorist threat was comparable to that in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. That plot was hatched in Hamburg by Islamic militants posing as students.

Mr. Schäuble coupled his warning with a call for stricter anti-terrorism measures. He said he would like the police to be able to conduct surreptitious searches of computers belonging to people suspected of being terrorists.

In the past, some critics here have accused Mr. Schäuble of ratcheting up fears of terrorism in order to build support for his measures. But no such criticisms were voiced on Wednesday.

Former Pakistani Premier Fighting Deportation



ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 11 — Lawyers representing the exiled former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who was deported to Saudi Arabia on Monday, filed petitions in the Supreme Court on Tuesday against the government, accusing it of abducting him and of acting in contempt of the court.

Relatives and members of his political party said that Mr. Sharif was tricked when he was forced onto a plane after his arrest at the Islamabad airport and that he did not go willingly or knowingly to Saudi Arabia. They vowed to fight his case in the courts and demanded that the government bring him back to Pakistan to give his version of events.

At the same time, Mr. Sharif’s wife, Kulsoom Nawaz, announced from London that she would take up the political mantle of his party and return to Pakistan to lead the campaign for elections in her husband’s place. A rival politician, Abida Hussain, said that she could bank on a sympathy vote and that she could easily sweep central Punjab, the most populous province, in the elections.

Reaction on the streets to Mr. Sharif’s deportation was muted. Much of the leadership of Mr. Sharif’s party and some other opposition leaders remained in detention or under house arrest. Lawyers called a strike in protest at the treatment of Mr. Sharif, closing down all the courts, including the Supreme Court, which adjourned midmorning.
Politicians and analysts said that the manhandling of Mr. Sharif by security forces at the Islamabad airport soon after he arrived had not been positively perceived in the country and that it would play against Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in the coming weeks and months as he tried to hold on to power.

Government ministers continued to say that Mr. Sharif had chosen to be deported rather than go to prison on charges of money laundering. They said he had agreed to fulfill an earlier agreement, in 2000, to go into exile in Saudi Arabia for 10 years in return for having a life sentence commuted.

But Mr. Sharif’s lawyer, Fakhruddin Ebrahim, said he was deported illegally, especially in view of the recent Supreme Court ruling that said he should be allowed to return and remain in Pakistan.

“He was abducted and forcibly deported,” Mr. Ebrahim said. “The government is a party to the abduction and has flouted the constitution and the Supreme Court.”

Mr. Ebrahim filed two petitions on Mr. Sharif’s behalf at the Supreme Court, one for contempt of court and one to request that the court order the government to bring Mr. Sharif back to Pakistan so he could appear before the court and give his version of events.

The chief justice said he would examine the petitions in two days after a detailed judgment from a previous hearing on the case was finished, Mr. Ebrahim said.

Hamza Sharif, the nephew of the exiled former leader, said the government version, reiterated by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, was a “blatant lie.” Mr. Sharif was marched on to a plane and told he was being flown to Karachi, the largest city, or Quetta, near the Afghan border, and was told midflight that he was actually being taken to Saudi Arabia, he said.

“He never wanted to leave this country,” he said of his uncle. He said he had talked twice to his uncle and that on Tuesday he was in high spirits. He will remain in Saudi Arabia for the meantime in the hope that the government will be forced to bring him before the Supreme Court.

Javed Hashmi, a vice president of Mr. Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, said the plane carrying Mr. Sharif was logged at the Islamabad airport as going to Quetta.

But Mr. Sharif was told he was being taken to Karachi to appear before a court there. After an hour and a half, by which time the plane should have landed, he was told he was being taken to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Hashmi said.

Mr. Hashmi, a member of Parliament and a vocal opponent of General Musharraf, was placed under house arrest in his parliamentary lodgings on Sunday night, as were several leading members of the opposition parties. Mr. Hashmi was recently released after eight years in prison for his opposition. His daughter, also a legislator, was arrested too, but later released, he said.

The opposition politicians detained were all members of the All Parties Democratic Movement, formed in July by Mr. Sharif to fight General Musharraf’s continued rule. They were all planning to go to the airport to greet Mr. Sharif on Monday morning and were either put under guard at their residences, or arrested at police checkpoints on the way to the airport.

Hundreds of political activists have been detained for one month under a public maintenance order, but a few of them were released by Tuesday.

The information secretary of Mr. Sharif’s party, Ahsan Iqbal, was transferred for one month to a jail in the southern town of Bahawalpur, said his son, Mohammed Iqbal.

Liaqat Baloch, deputy leader of the coalition of religious parties, the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, was also placed under guard at his lodgings, but the police allowed journalists to see him. “At this stage, Musharraf is afraid of the political movement,” he said.
 
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