www.nbqfjr.com

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Update: As an astute reader pointed out, the rebate is actually a Visa debit card, not a check. You’re still getting $70 back, but you can’t put it in your bank account. Sorry for the confusion.

I’ve not found any hard-hitting reviews of this model, though three Staples customers had very positive things to say. If you’re looking for cheap, high-quality color printing (in my book, lasers always trump inkjets) and don’t mind waiting on a rebate, this looks like a solid deal.

(Credit:
Samsung)

The printer features a 150-sheet input tray, a maximum print resolution of 2,400 x 600 dpi, and rated print speeds of 17 pages per minute and 4 ppm for black and color, respectively. Alas, it’s not a network printer, and it doesn’t even come with a USB cable. (For the love of Cheapskate, don’t pay Staples $19.99 for one; get one from someplace like Monoprice for 88 cents.)

The Samsung CLP-315 laser printer comes dressed in black, but it cranks out glorious color. Normally $200, Staples has the CLP-315 on sale for $129.98 after a $70 mail-in rebate. Shipping is free, though you may have to pay sales tax.

(Credit:
Association for Computing Machinery)

Google CIO Benjamin Fried

That means information technology budgets are high, technology turns over quickly, and IT executives have more power and responsibility than they do at the average company.

Another influential thinker in the domain is Nicholas Carr, whose 2003 Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter” riled up computing companies who saw things differently. The article posited that buying computing technology wasn’t a good way to get ahead, because everybody else already had done so, too.

But Google isn’t likely to outsource anything. Like Salesforce.com and Amazon with its pay-as-you-go Web services, Google’s ambition is be a site where software as a service runs.

Most companies buy off-the-shelf software, but Wall Street firms like to write their own. Indeed, one of the areas under Fried’s purview at Morgan Stanley was managing source code. Google takes this custom engineering philosophy a step further, building its own hardware, too. That’s an important cultural commonality.

“It’s very unlike Main Street or Rust Belt or retail, where everything is about cost. In finance, it’s all about the service delivered,” Eunice added. “We’re not talking ERP and CRM–six months to begin looking at it and five years to put it in,” he said, referring to the sluggish and expensive deployments of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management computing systems.

For Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and the like, top-notch computing can mean placing a stock trade order a smidgen faster than rivals, yielding a handsome profit for as long as the advantage can be maintained. For Google, it means an up-to-date search engine that can return results alongside targeted advertisements in less than a second.

Even though Google is a Silicon Valley company thousands of miles away from the buttoned-down brokers of lower Manhattan, the two domains have more in common technologically and culturally than one might think.

Wall Street and Google also must make their technology work across a scale seldom seen, with thousands of servers working in tandem.

Google found its new chief information officer, Ben Fried, on Wall Street–and at least on paper, it looks like a good fit.

Wall Street companies and Google have different objectives, but both have a similar modus operandi. They use lots of cutting-edge computer equipment, often with plenty of in-house customization, to get ahead of the competition.

Its Google Apps service offers word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, and e-mail in an online form, and its new App Engine is now available as a general foundation where programmers can house their own Web-based applications, piggybacking on some Google technology.

In short, it looks like Google wants to expand the influence of its computing infrastructure. What better place to be a CIO?

Google and Wall Street are quintessential examples of what Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos calls redshift companies. Essentially, these are the companies that use technology as a competitive advantage, not a necessary and costly evil.

“They have a very similar attitude: ‘Dammit, we can do it better than anyone else,’” said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice.

In the years since he published the article, though, many companies have decided that indeed some IT, at least, doesn’t matter. Salesforce.com, for example, hosts CRM software on its own servers and sells its clients access to the systems. This “software as a service” approach is catching on, as Carr discussed in his 2005 sequel, “The End of Corporate Computing.

Icahn told Reuters on Tuesday that Yahoo directors may be held personally liable for signing off on the company’s controversial employee-severance plans. That plan, as previously reported, could financially hamstring Icahn’s dissident slate if it is successful in unseating Yahoo’s board and taking a majority of the board seats.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has issued a warning to Yahoo’s board of directors, mouthing the ever-fearful two words: “personally liable.”

Carl Icahn

Basically, companies usually carry insurance to cover their directors against various liabilities. But, like any insurance plan, there is a cap on the coverage limits. Icahn apparently is anticipating that any legal action against the board may exceed those limits or is willing to argue that the board abdicated its responsibilities, thereby letting the insurance company off the hook.

“If they continue with this line, I believe they (the board) may be personally liable,” Icahn told Reuters after speaking to the New York Financial Writers Association.

Meanwhile, SAP’s archrival, Oracle, edged up in morning trading to $15.88 a share, gaining less than 1 percent during intraday trading.

The company reported revenues of 2.76 billion euros, up 14 percent over the same time last year. Prior to issuing its third-quarter warning earlier this month, Wall Street had expected SAP to post revenues of 2.86 billion euros.

The company, which dealt investors a blow a couple weeks ago, when it issued its third-quarter warning and reduced its revenue forecast for the quarter, offered no reassurances to shareholders in this latest report.

In fact, SAP nixed its revenue forecast for the year–in essence yanking away investors’ security blanket. Shareholders often find great comfort in the revenues and earnings forecasts that companies provide for the current and upcoming quarters.

In light of the uncertainties surrounding the current economic and business environment, the company decided to no longer provide a specific outlook for non-GAAP software and software-related service revenues for the full year 2008.

The current woes for SAP began in the second half of September, taking the technology titan by surprise, given the speed and depth of the cutback in customer orders.

Sales of SAP’s software and software-related services rose to 1.99 billion euros in the third quarter, up 15 percent over last year. And revenues of software not tied to SAP services climbed to 763 euros, a 7 percent increase. But the company’s net income fell to 388 million euros, or 35 cents a share, in the third quarter, down from 408 million euros a year ago.

SAP reported its third-quarter results Tuesday, posting a 5 percent decline in earnings and nixing its revenue forecast for the year, given the uncertainty of the economic climate.

However, with recent cost savings initiatives in place, the company expects the full-year 2008 non-GAAP operating margin, which excludes a nonrecurring deferred support revenue write-down of 180 million euros from the acquisition of Business Objects and acquisition-related charges, to be around 28 percent, at constant currencies, if the company can increase non-GAAP software and software-related service revenues, excluding a nonrecurring deferred support revenue write-down from the acquisition of Business Objects, in a range between 20 percent and 22 percent, at constant currencies for the full year 2008.

In a statement, SAP said:

The German enterprise software maker, which reported its results prior to the market opening, saw its shares head slightly south as the morning progressed, falling to $30.02 a share, down less than 1 percent in intraday trading.

Last week, eBay announced that Chief Executive Meg Whitman would step down after 10 years at the helm to make way for fresh leadership. She is being replaced by John Donahoe, head of eBay Marketplaces.

As expected, eBay has lowered fees for listing items to sell and adjusted other fees in response to a slowdown in sales activity on the online auction site. The company also said on Tuesday that it is raising its commission for items that sell, which reduces the risk for sellers in the event an item does not sell, and is offering a free gallery picture with each listing.

Flowgram is a worthy tool for capturing insight, commentary and viewpoint. More than a pre-programmed screencast, it lets you take people by the hand as you show them things they need to know, yet it also keeps them from going completely off the rails and getting lost, as a more open-ended tutorial might.

Flowgram is cool tool for anyone trying to lead others through a thicket of web pages and ideas. With it, you chain together pages, photos,
Microsoft Office documents, RSS feeds and custom pages, overlay each link in the chain with your own voiceover and annotation, then put the flowgram out on the the net: on your site, at YouTube, wherever you want people to find it.

Abhay hasn’t decided to monetize Flowgram by embedding advertising, or by selling the product to companies who are looking a tool for training, marketing or support.

Where did Abhay get the idea for Flowgram? “Services like Digg, Flickr or Stumbleupon are really optimized for sharing one thing, one link, one cool thing that somebody found. As opposed to a way to explain to people something that might be on multiple websites, where you want to point out things. Where you want have your message, where you want to give it your own take.”

Flowgram – in open beta and currently free – has about 5,000 users today, according to Flowgram CEO Abhay Parekh. Abhay has been around the startup block a few times – he sold his last startup, FastForward Networks, to Inktomi for over $1 billion in 2000, then joined the VC firm Accel as a partner and became and adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.

Here’s my first flowgram – a Brief Intro to Twitter – that I created in about an hour. Learning how to enter URLS (there’s a handy bookmarklet available too), select images (from Facebook or Flickr or your own
Mac or PC), add annotation and record a voiceover for each segment was extremely easy. In fact the hardest part was trying to speak coherently about each image.

A Flowgram is more than a Flash movie: each web page is live and you can interact with it while seeing the author’s annotation and hearing their narration. Behind the scenes Flowgram’s servers are grabbing the HTML of what you see on the screen.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer share the stage at D6 on Tuesday in Carlsbad, Calif.

The chairman did have a little more to say, such as whether his new job would mean more time with his family.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

“In a small way,” he said, saying that in addition to dropping his kids off at school three days a week as he does now, he’ll be able to pick them up some of the time.

Gates said he knew the question would come up on stage and that he wouldn’t have more to say. “You won’t see me answer since it’s all up to Steve.”

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

“It is a very tough situation,” he said.

(Credit:
CNET News.com)

I asked him about whether the spike in gas prices is helping in some ways by drawing more attention to the energy challenges.

“No,” Gates said and stopped speaking. “Steve (Ballmer) might give a more nuanced answer.”

But he noted that giving away $3 billion a year is a major undertaking.

CARLSBAD, Calif.–Mingling with reporters on Tuesday ahead of his appearance at D: All Things Digital, Bill Gates was asked if he had comment on Yahoo.

While there may be some increased attention, Gates said, it pales in comparison with the increased suffering. He noted that while most Americans see higher gas and food prices, the consequences are even greater for the world’s poor.

Farmers get caught in a negative cycle where they use less fertilizer, get lower crop yields, and thus have even less to spend, he said.

Infosys: Holograms on handsets by 2010

Today’s stories:

The last week has seen a slew of high-level departures from Yahoo. What do they mean? CNET News.com reporter Stephen Shankland breaks down the executive exodus–or as he calls it, “execudos.”

Icahn set to release his final Yahoo slate

eBay pumps up PayPal protections

Making bats the Louisville Slugger way

Yahoo natives abandoning ship

Note to Netflix: Roku box needs latest movies

Plus, new numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook. It appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time.

Jammie Thomas likely to get another day in court

And be sure to tune in Monday, when News.com’s Holly Jackson will talk to New York Post entertainment features writer Michael Kane about his new book Game Boys: Professional Videogaming’s Rise from the Basement to the Big Time. Kane followed two of professional gaming’s most well-known teams, Team 3D and CompLexity, as they fought for sponsorships, players, and the No. 1 spot in gaming. Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

ComScore: Facebook is beating MySpace worldwide

The following products are available:

On Sale Now: $79.95 – $129.95
View the latest prices for Kodak Zi6 (pink)

While most models are getting smaller, the Zi6 is relatively huge–approximately the size of the clunky RCA Small Wonder. The size is predictably necessary to accommodate the 1/4.5-inch 1.6-megapixel sensor and large LCD. But the Zi6 also runs off two AA batteries. Though they’re rechargeable, and Kodak provides a charger, most camcorders like this charge off the USB connection while downloading.

Kodak plans to charge $179.95 for the Zi6 when it ships in September, and you’ll have to tack on at least another $20 for a 2GB card, which brings the price up to $200. People buy these camcorders because they’re cute, cheap and easy. They don’t seem to care about the poor video quality, so I doubt they’ll pay a premium for HD–and I haven’t seen the video yet, so it could very well be poor HD. (We’ll have a review soon.) And it doesn’t do
Mac, does the Mac incompletely–the whole direct-to-YouTube upload capability operates through Windows-only software–making it not-so-easy for lots of people in its target market. Furthermore, the extra cost of the card puts it in competition with a whole other class of products, such as the Aiptek Go-HD, which offer features like zoom lenses. It’ll be quite interesting to see how the market responds to the Zi6.

Until under-thirtysomethings outgrow them, direct-to-YouTube camcorders will continue to flourish. And everyone wants a piece of the pie that was pretty much baked by Flip Video, with products like its latest Mino. Some efforts seem rather cynical and halfhearted like Samsung’s recent attempt to remarket an old design into a market ruled by a different aesthetic. Others, like Kodak’s just-announced Zi6, seem promising. But Kodak also misses the point in a few ways.

(Credit:
Kodak)

On one hand, there are a couple of ways in which veteran Kodak outclasses its younger competitors: 720p HD video compared with the typical 640×480-pixel VGA resolution and a 2.4-inch LCD. A nice touch, which shows its heritage, is a switch that toggles between standard and macro focus distances. As seems to define this product category, it has a built-in, flip-out USB connector. Cleverly, the button for the connector also serves as a tiny mirror for shooting yourself in the face. It also accepts SD cards, but that’s to supplement its paltry 128MB of storage–only 30MB of which is available for video. I tried it, and that was 36 seconds. It might as well have no internal memory at all. Extrapolating–Kodak has not published any capacity information–that’s about 50MB per minute, or 41 minutes of video on a typical 2GB card. Which is optional.

On Sale Now: $69.00 – $89.99
View the latest prices for Kodak Zi6 (black)

The Zi6 comes in black and pink.

While riding the ‘Toy Story Mania’ ride at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, I figured out that if I put my 3D glasses in front of my camera, I could take pictures of the target screens without them coming out blurry.

Afterward, we got back in my escort’s van and zipped back over to Epcot. I still wanted a chance to go on two more of the popular rides there: “Test Track” and “Soarin’.” And I figured why wait in hour-plus lines for them if I could take advantage of the secret entrances my escort could lead me to.

Finished with “Soarin’,” my day was pretty much over. A long day, to be sure, but one with plenty of thrills.

As our instructors told us how to get on and how to get off, how to speed up and how to slow down and so many other crucial things, I could detect the work of people in suits at a firm somewhere that probably had an ampersand in its name.

Being a modern ride, this attraction is full of little tricks. For example, what you see on the screen is in 3D, so you have to wear 3D glasses to see the targets properly. Also, you are firing at them with a gun mounted on your car, and you are shooting digital bullets at them which splat satisfyingly on the screen. Well, at least they seem to. They’re digital, after all.

Well, fair enough. Finally, we finished up, and led by a genial woman named Carole, we headed out into Epcot for a leisurely and decidedly untaxing tour around the World Showcase, the park’s collection of small scale model representations of some of the famous buildings, stores, towers and so forth from countries like France, Japan, China, Italy, Morocco, and others.

We had taken a back entrance into the ride so that we didn’t have to wait in the extremely long line, but after finishing we went back into the main area so that we could see some of the cool details the designers had added.

Truthfully, the tour wasn’t that informative. We got maybe 30 seconds of information about each of the countries we stopped in and then we moved quickly on. I think the real point was to give us enough fodder to make us want to return later when we were on our feet.

Fun stuff, actually, and another attraction you, my beloved readers, had suggested I try.

They included a large set of dominoes and a huge View-Master reel hanging from the ceiling, as well as a giant Tinker-Toy structure that all the cars have to drive through.

I was sitting inside a small dome, antsy to get going on the special Segway tour of this famous theme park that I had arranged. But before they would let me or any of the others on the tour head out and ride around on our gyroscopic human transporters, we had to sit through more than half an hour of tedious, but entirely practical, training.

It was pretty exhilarating. In parts, at least. The realistic effects of the seats rocking back and forth definitely helped, as did the huge screen and the larger-than life video on it.

So you hop into a small
car, which races off into a tunnel–very Disney-esque, of course–and one by one, you have to shoot at these villains, who appear on a screen on the wall in front of you.

The ride, which opened last month at Disney World and is set to open later this month at Disneyland, is a super fast-paced cacophony of an adventure based on the story line from Pixar’s Toy Story films.

Riding the Segways was one of the suggestions I got from readers when I asked last week what I should do at Disney World when I visited as part of Road Trip 2008, my journey around the South. And I have to say, it was a great idea. I love Segways, first of all, and secondly, how great is it to glide around effortlessly on a hot day when everyone else is working up a sweat just strolling from point A to point B.

The idea is that you find yourself plopped down into a huge model of the little boy’s room from the films and are tasked with battling a whole series of different nemeses.

Sure enough, we wandered straight to the front of the “Test Track” line. This is a pretty cool ride that puts guests in the front seat of a car that is then rushed through Disney scale representations of 10 different tests that General Motors cars go through before they can hit the road.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

At Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla., I joined a Segway tour of the park. But before we could head out, we had to undergo about 30 minutes of training to make sure no one endangered themselves or anyone else.

These included going uphill fast, braking without and then with antilock brakes, accelerating (up to 65 miles an hour) on a straight-away, going over some rough road and going slowly through both a very hot and a very cold room.

Until I put the glasses in front of the lens, that is. Both for my camera, and then for the Nokia phone (see video below).

EPCOT CENTER, Fla.–Ah, lawyers.

For me, the trick was both to enjoy the ride and to try to take pictures and shoot video. At first, I couldn’t figure out why the pictures were coming out fuzzy, but then I realized it was the fact that the camera had no idea what to do with the 3D images.

After we returned to our starting point–no Epcot patrons were harmed in this experiment–I was met by a member of Disney World’s public relations team who kindly escorted me to a van stashed conveniently nearby in staff parking, and we set off for Disney’s Hollywood Studios for a whirlwind tour of the not new ride there, “Toy Story Mania.”

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

After all, when you’re Disney, you want to make sure you cover all your bases when it comes to liability.

“Soarin’” is actually pretty sweet: it puts you in the seat of what is meant to be something along the lines of a hang-glider and then whisks you, with your seat seeming to rush into the wind, diving or climbing with what you see on screen, up, down and over things like the Golden Gate Bridge, a ski slope, a Napa vineyard, the ocean, a river, a desert, and more.

Sure enough, I was one of the very last people to get one of the tickets, but my time wasn’t for about six hours. So I went back to my hotel, did some work, and then finally returned, right on time.

There were also little details that only the careful eye would catch, such as some child’s books painted on the wall, the author of one of which was named Lasseter. For the Pixar fans among us, that’s an obvious reference to Toy Story director and current Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter.

As you fire away, you accumulate points as you hit targets. As I understand it, the ride offers up a lot of “easter eggs,” or hidden surprises. But I was too wrapped up in trying to document it to shoot much. I ended up with a rather pathetic score, especially when measured against the impressive total racked up by my escort.

Unfortunately, though, we couldn’t work out a way to expedite entry to “Soarin’,” so I decided to try my luck at getting one of Disney World’s FastPasses–which allow you to get a ticket guaranteeing quick entry much later in the day–for the ride.

We were instructed, by the way, not to carry anything in our hands while we rode the Segways. But what is a reporter to do? So I tried to surreptitiously carry my Nokia smartphone in my hand so I could shoot Qik video (see below) of the ride. I only got caught once.

Even if some lawyers got in the way of all my fun on my Segway.