Google has requested imagery from Digital Globe, the satellite imagery firm in Longmont, Colo., to help in the search for missing Nevada aviator Steve Fossett.

Fossett disappeared after taking off at the controls of a small plane Monday from the Flying M Ranch airstrip about 70 southeast of Reno, Nev. He left no flight plan, and searchers have been combing a 10,000 square mile expanse of Nevada and California to no avail.

Digital Globe’s QuickBird satellite scanned what is believed to be an 11-mile wide and 120-mile long strip of Nevada around the ranch, but Fossett could have flown beyond the boundaries of the satellite scan. Google declined to comment on the search but it’s known to connect search and rescue teams to available satellite imagery. Digital Globe and other satellite company imagery companies routinely feed Google data that goes into its Google Earth software, but Google Earth image posting is typically three to six months behind when it was taken.

Several Internet users in the United States have been unplugged by their service provider because they download too much, a press report said here Friday.

Cable Internet and entertainment provider Comcast “has punished some transgressors by cutting off their Internet service, arguing that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers,” the Washington Post reported.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told AFP the company was addressing “the problem of abusive activity that adversely impacts on everybody else’s experience.”

“I can’t give you a number” for clients who have been disconnected, said Douglas, while assuring that customers whose plugs were pulled are “very rare.”

According to the Washington Post, a customer would have to download the equivalent of 1,000 songs or four feature films a day to trigger a disconnection warning.

Comcast gives customers a month to fix problems or upgrade their service before they are disconnected, the Washington Post said.

At the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA) trade show in Denver, a company promoting a new high-definition optical disc format demonstrated set-top players and high-definition movies that cost far less than ones that use the competing Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD formats. The only faux pas: Arriving late to a two-party format war that consumers are already reluctant to support.

Next month, New Medium Enterprises’ 1080p set-top players, which use the HD VMD (Versatile Multilayer Disc) format, will go on sale on Amazon.com and in stores such as Radio Shack and Costco for around $150–about half the cost of the least-expensive 1080p HD DVD player, and perhaps a fourth the cost of the least-expensive Blu-ray player. The movies that work in them are similarly inexpensive.

“Expect a small premium over DVD [discs], and a big discount over Blu-ray and HD DVD,” says Jim Cardwell, an advisor to the company and former president of Warner Home Video.
Red-Laser Technology

Instead of the blue-laser technology embraced by the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps, the HD VMD format uses the red-laser technology already used to create DVDs, and as a result, keeps the cost of manufacturing discs and drives low, says Eugene Levich, director and chief technology officer of New Medium Enterprises. He said that manufacturing a Blu-ray drive costs ten times as much as manufacturing a DVD or HD VMD drive, because the latter two are essentially the same drive but with different firmware.

HD VMD discs, which hold up to 30GB on a single side, are encoded with a maximum bit rate of 40 megabits per second; that’s within spitting distance of Blu-ray’s 48 mbps, and quite a bit more than 36 mbps for HD DVD. The format uses MPEG-2 and VC1 video formats to encode at 1080p resolution for the time being, and will possibly move to the H.264 format in the future.

Eudora, a pioneering e-mail program named after author Eudora Welty, is rising from a technical grave as an open source program after owner Qualcomm Inc quit selling the product in May.

Eudora routinely got strong reviews from computer magazines and had a loyal user base, but commercially it was overshadowed by software that Microsoft Corp included with new personal computers, International Business Machine’s Lotus software and Web e-mail programs.

Qualcomm donated Eudora to the open-source community, which means that anybody is free to download and use it without paying for the product. Developers can also access the code, change it and share those changes.
The new version of Eudora is being developed under the code name Penelope.

Mozilla has said it plans to develop both Eudora and Thunderbird.

AOL is once again revamping its Netscape.com Web portal, dropping a year-old “social news” component in which visitors submitted and voted on news stories and blog entries to determine how they’re ranked on the site.

AOL, the Internet services unit of Time Warner Inc., said it isn’t giving up on social news completely and will instead send interested visitors to a separate, yet-to-be-determined Web address.

However, AOL said visitor feedback indicated that “people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled.” In a blog posting, the company said some readers liked the social-news experience “but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.”

The feature received tepid response when it was introduced last summer. Over the past year, U.S. visitors to the Netscape home page dropped by about half to 2.4 million in July, according to comScore Media Metrix. By contrast, visitors to social-news rival Digg.com nearly quadrupled to 4.6 million.