Mr. Apotheker made clear that he was departing from Mr. Hurd’s legacy of cost-cutting to invest more in H.P.’s once-celebrated research and development programs. Although he did not offer shop online 2011 specifics, he said that financing for H.P.’s lab would increase faster than the company’s overall growth in revenue this year and focus on marketable innovations.Software, which has much higher margins of 17.6 percent, accounted for only 3 percent of H.P.’s business. Two months ago, Mr. Apotheker shook up the H.P. board, including replacing four members. At the time, the company said that the new blood — which included executives with experience in global business and technology — would add breadth of talent to the company’s leadership. Mr. Apotheker said the company’s software division would focus on security software and business analytics — the crunching of big sets of data — areas where its rivals already excel. But H.P. is hardly in the forefront in terms of business analytics or the Power balance armband cloud, which has been an industry buzzword for several years. Asked whether H.P. was late, Mr. Apotheker said, “We are not playing catch-up to anyone, particularly I.B.M.” He said that no company had a truly powerful offering in business analytics. The challenge for H.P. will be to win customers from established rivals like I.B.M., Oracle and SAP. Persuading large companies to go with a relative newcomer, however, can be difficult, even one the size of H.P. To accelerate H.P.’s shift into software, Mr. Apotheker raised the possibility of acquisitions. However, he said the company would be “disciplined,” implying that blockbuster mergers were unlikely. The strategy outlined by Mr. Apotheker is intended to lift H.P.’s profit margins. Although personal computers are a big source of revenue for the company, they are a low-margin power balancebusiness, about 6.4 percent in the latest quarter. Personal computers and laptops accounted for 32 percent of H.P.’s revenue in 2010.
As we reported today, Microsoft is doing everything it can to promote Windows Phone 7 as the platform of choice for professional software developers desiring to create best-of-breed smartphone online shopapps. To show the way, the company has deeply hooked three of its most popular software services into the WP7 platform.Internet Explorer, Xbox Live and Outlook Exchange are seamless integrated into WP7's main dashboard. Microsoft is not stopping there. Here is an exclusive USA TODAY video about the software giant's long-haul strategy:An interesting bit of tech triva: Microsoft revised its work rules to incentivize employees to create cool stuff for WP7 in their spare time. The carrot: they get to share the financial benefit of their work.Microsoft developers who create published WP7 apps stand to receive a standard split on app sales: 70 percent to the developer, 30 percent to Microsoft. Of the 28,000 developers who've registered to create apps for WP7, some 3,000 are moonlighting Microsoft employees; to date some 840 employees-built apps have been published, says Microsoft senior product manager Larry Lieberman.Windows Phone 7 is currently available from more than 60 carriers in over 30 countries worldwide. Since launching WP7 launch last October, Microsoft says it has sold licenses to build over 2 million handsets to original power balanceequipment manufacturers, including HTC and Samsung.Early research indicates 93% of customers worldwide are satisfied with their WP7 hansets, and 90% would recommend WP7 models to others, says Lieberman.
ISS’s recommendation is based on a “misinterpretation of the process that HP employed in identifying, selecting and nominating” directors, Hewlett-Packard said in a statement yesterday.Stockholders’ power balanceInterest“We do not believe that it would be in the best interests of HP’s stockholders to lose the service of the experienced and dedicated board members who have been delegated primary responsibility for establishing and maintaining those governance practices,” Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard said.Hewlett-Packard reshaped its board with executives who have ties to Apotheker, whose tenure as CEO began Nov. 1. One director sits on a board in Europe with Apotheker, and at least three others have been customers of German software maker SAP AG, where Apotheker was CEO and worked for two decades. The ties could inhibit directors from acting objectively, ISS said.Apotheker played a direct role in picking new board members, a move that contravenes the board’s own rules governing director selection, according to Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., an adviser to investors on corporate governance powerbalance matters.“The direct participation of Apotheker in the appointment of five new directors raises red flags,” ISS said in a report prepared for clients and obtained by Bloomberg News. “The board is responsible for representing shareholders and overseeing management, in particular the CEO.”ISS recommended that shareholders vote against three sitting directors who are up for re-election at the annual meeting, scheduled for March 23, because they shouldn’t have permitted Apotheker to play a role in the nomination, ISS said.Hewlett-Packard Co. directors, including Chief Executive Officer Leo Apotheker, went against company rules in their shop online 2011appointment of new board members, according to a shareholder-advisory group.
To much of the outside basketball world, Boston president Danny Ainge went fixing what hadn't seemed broke. He snuffed Rivers' rallying cry of the past three postseasons ("This starting five has never lost a series"), doing to Perkins for all time what the big center's right knee had done in Game 6 against the Lakers in June. He gave concerns about the franchise's shop online 2011 future -- Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen will eventually exit, after all, and Perkins was going to be difficult to re-sign -- equal standing with the present.Here they were, the mighty Celtics, a championship contender built at least in part on chemistry, going forward on that delicate front as if a cartload of chimpanzees had been turned loose in the lab. To the right, to the left, everywhere you looked, stalls that had been filled by buddies were either vacant or sublet by strangers.Three years ago, the NBA was introduced to the word and concept of ubuntu, an African concept focusing on a person's allegiance to the group. Embraced by Boston head coach Doc Rivers, it took teamwork and loyalty to a new level. "I am what I am because of who we all are" is the essence of ubuntu, and it helped the Celtics win a championship in 2008 and get back to the Finals last spring.Rajon Rondo and Perkins -- the George and Lenny, or Felix and Oscar, of the squad -- used to "locker" side-by-side throughout the league, borrowing each other's deodorant, sharing each other's food, sometimes finishing each other powerbalancesentences. Now splitsville.Others had been through the dill before. Kevin Garnett once put a towel over his head and sobbed, effectively kicking away a game at Houston, when a teammate from his previous life, Dean Garrett, got traded unexpectedly one night.Yet here they were, heading down the stretch in 2010-11, changing up the "we" as if it were a new pair of socks.If any NBA team should have been crying in recent days, it should have been the one in the visitors' dressing room at the Bradley Center the other night. The Boston Celtics were playing the Bucks in their sixth game in the 10 days since the trading deadline that convulsed their roster and jolted those left behind.Going by the Miami Heat's "Band of Brothers" stab-at-a-theme this season, the Celtics had just emerged from a nasty custody battle, separated suddenly from five siblings (Kendrick Perkins, Nate Robinson, Marquis Daniels, Luke Harangody, Semih Erden) who had been with them for months or, in some cases, years.Tears over losing games? Try losing power balancefriends, teammates, family.
A few days earlier, Rein had told power balance blog VentureBeat that new hardware improvements mimic what's gone on in the PC gaming space. "You can see Unreal Engine 3, what happens as we get more power, you can take a PC and put a much more powerful graphics card in, and turn all the dials up in your game to get more detail, more textures, more shaders--things like that. Clearly those are the kinds of opportunities here," Rein said. "More CPU means potentially more physics and more enemies on the screen, a wider view of an environment. It's just really fantastic.""Unity's always been really extensible. You use the same shaders on the iPad as you do for the PlayStation 3, so we have to sit down and say 'OK, how do we really do we really tweak it and bend it to make sure all our users have all those resources?'" Those effects could include shafts of light coming from between tree branches and through windows, as well as real-time shadows, giving games and landscape rendering applications more realism. "Essentially it means that a lot of the shop online 2011stuff that was developed for consoles will now run on the iPad," Francis said. One of the other big players that's come into Apple's corner within just the past year has been Epic Games, the makers of the Unreal Engine. While Unreal can be found in a large number of PC games, it didn't show up in iOS games in earnest until Epic Citadel, a technology demo of the Unreal Engine for iOS shown off at the unveiling of the iPhone 4. This was later followed up by Infinity Blade, which the company released at the end of last year and has gone on to become one of the top grossing games on the App Store and the primary example game in Apple's iPad 2 marketing materials. Like Unity, Unreal is an engine developers use to power their 3D games. In the process of bringing it to the iOS platform, Epic Games had to make a number of concessions in its graphics processing. At the Game Developers Conference around this time last year, a company spokesperson, explaining how Epic had squeezed it down into the iPhone and other mobile devices, said that having an extra processing core on the iPhone would be good, and that "four would be great." In an e-mail to CNET last week, vice president of Epic Games Mark Rein said that "Unreal Engine 3 is fully capable of taking advantage of the extra power of iPad 2" and that "UE3 developers can already put this extra power to use and make even more amazing apps and games for iPad 2." It's really nice Apple put in a faster GPU because the iPad had a very large screen, but the same GPU as the iPhone 3GS. So the iPad had a lot more pixels to pull, but developers had a lot less horsepower to pull per pixel," he said. "Unity already takes advantage of multiple cores within a system. So we'll need to go in and really fine tune and really optimize it to run fantastic on the iPad." Francis said that the Power balance bracelet graphics boost means iOS developers will be able to bring over a handful of additional effects available on PC and console gaming, and that they'll be able to do it with the company's tool.
Police have long said the person responsible for the rapes likely lived or worked near where they occurred. Thomas's address history places him close to almost all of the rapes linked by DNA. In the late 1990s, four Prince George's attacks took place within five chanel eyewear 2011miles of his District Heights home. One was as close as a mile. An address listed for Thomas in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County, where the rapes in 1999 occurred, was within four miles of three attacks along Route 1. It was three-quarters of a mile from a 2001 rape on Rolling Hills Avenue. An address listed for him in Prince William was two miles from the Halloween 2009 rape of two teenagers; his current address in New Haven is seven miles from the rape there.At some point, however, he attempted suicide by hanging, said Officer Joe Avery, a New Haven police spokesman. Avery said Thomas was sent to a hospital for observation after the incident, then returned to the facility where he was being held. At a news conference Saturday, New Haven police Lt. Julie Johnson said that "although the gucci sunglasses 2011information and investigation of Thomas developed quickly over the last week or so . . . investigators worked tirelessly for years pursuing this case." Johnson said she hoped the arrest "brings some closure to our victims." Authorities announced Saturday that Thomas has been charged with sex assault, burglary and risk of injury to a minor in connection with a January 2007 attack on a New Haven, Conn., woman that occurred in her apartment as her infant son slept in a crib nearbyThomas, who is being held on a $1 million bond, also is charged with two counts of rape, abduction and a firearm count in connection with a Halloween 2009 attack of three teenage girls in Prince William County, law enforcement officials said. A law enforcement source familiar with the investigation said on Saturday that Thomas had been "very cooperative" and talked with detectives from Maryland and Virginia who traveled to New Haven on Friday. A Cranston, R.I., woman whose daughter saw the rapist poke his head through the partially open sliding glass door of their deck in November 2006, said she was relieved. Her daughter's screams chased the man but she had wondered where he was and whether he would return. "You never knew," she said. "Now he's not able to rape or assault anyone else." The breakthrough came last week, when police got a tip from an acquaintance of the suspect. Police had sponsored a media blitz, with composite sketches of the attacker on digital billboards along the East Coast and a Web site on the case. Thomas was on a short list of suspects culled from hundreds. Police tracked him down at an unrelated court appearance Thursday in New Haven, where they recovered the cigarette butt. Messages left Saturday at phone numbers listed for his relatives were not returned. Thomas attended a Prince George's County high school and often visited his mother in Clarke County, Va., according to law enforcement officials. The arrest of the alleged East Coast Rapist brought relief to victims Saturday as police announced formal charges against the Connecticut man taken into custody late last week. Law enforcement officials say DNA from a discarded shop online 2011 cigarette butt has linked Aaron H. Thomas, 39, to a series of rapes and other attacks on women spanning 13 years and four states, including Maryland and Virginia.