What’s up with all the trash of the computer?

Sony has won a permanent ban in Australia of a hack for its PS3, but the code behind it has been released for free on the web.

A potentially revolutionary circuit component, once a laboratory curiosity, is to be mass-produced for the first time.

The global disparity in access to broadband around the world and the cost of a connection is revealed by UN figures.

Samsung has become the latest manufacturer to enter into the tablet computer market with its Galaxy Tab.

Apple launches a music-based social network called Ping as part of its latest upgrade to the iTunes music software.

Twenty-three years ago, when I was a general assignment reporter at a soon-to-be defunct paper, the El Paso Herald-Post, I got a fabulous job offer. BusinessWeek asked me to open a bureau in Mexico City. If you had asked me at that juncture what a board of directors was for, or to distinguish between revenue and earnings, I would have been stumped. I had never covered business before (unless you count oil in Venezuela), and I didn’t know much about it. But BusinessWeek, I soon learned, was chock full of knowledgeable, friendly and forgiving folks who helped people like me learn on the job.

My career at BusinessWeek, which wraps up tomorrow, was an education. I’d start ignorant, and then learn on the job from sources and colleagues. That’s the great privilege of journalism, and BusinessWeek was the best place imaginable for it. When I was sent from Pittsburgh to Paris to cover technology in 1998, I knew far more about blast furnaces than semiconductors. When I came back to New York four years later as acting technology editor, I’d never worked as an editor or covered technology in the United States. People helped, and picked me up.

Many of those people are already scattered, and dozens more are leaving with me. I’d say I’ll miss them, but I plan to stay with them on the networks. Why would I ever venture out alone when I have the greatest colleagues? They’re the treasure of my career, and to forgo them at this point would be insane.

And so I move on. This is my last post at Blogspotting.net. A big thanks to Heather for the great company on this ride, and to all of you for your intelligence, feedback and friendship. We’ll stay in touch, I hope, at TheNumerati.net, and on your blogs and Twitter feeds. (I’m @stevebaker.)

I still haven’t figured out how to store the archives of Blogspotting. But I plan to write an email to the incoming editor in chief of BW, Josh Tyrangiel, asking him please not to pull the plug.

I came across a pumped-up email system called Pixetell that could help with a problem I’ve been having. Of late, I’ve been writing laborious click-by-click instructions to explain to people on a Ning network how to change their profiles. Sometimes the written word is a round-about way of communicating.

With Pixetell, it would be easier. You describe or explain whatever you want in your voice as you move the cursor around and click. And then it all goes in an email. The person receiving it might as well be looking over your shoulder. Here’s a video demo featuring my colleague Arik Hesseldahl.

The technology looks useful. It would be great for help desks. Not sure at this point if the rest of us would shell out $9 or $19 a month to be able to generate these messages. (Everyone can receive them, but for now, subscribers have to have Windows machines.) Looks like something that Microsoft and Google could add as an enhancement. In fact, it may compete with parts of Google Wave. But Pixetell looks far simpler. (I started to watch the Google Wave video, but then realized, to my horror, that it wasn’t a minute and 20 seconds, but an hour and 20 minutes.)

In a cluttered office, I’m discovering, almost nothing is worth keeping. But as I pack my things, I come across two books that give me second thought:

Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom–Why home values and other real estate investments will climb through the end of the decade, and how to profit from them. By David Lereah (sounds like something I should be on top of…)

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista. (Who knows, in two or three years, I might “upgrade” to Vista…)

Then my colleague Burt Helm, the marketing and advertising editor, comes by with an envelope. It’s a letter from the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation. You’d think these direct marketers would know Burt down to his weekend brunching habits. So it’s a surprise to see that they got his title wrong. They call him Bert [sic] Helm, Global President, Baby Kids & Wound Care Franchise. (I wonder if Bloomberg is quietly shifting his beat…)

Still working on saving the archives to this blog. It’s a bit of a problem here, because most of the people with control over the innards of this system have been let go. And even if they could help me, Bloomberg no doubt will own the content as of Dec. 1. Maybe I’ll just jury-rig something.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it, and a Happy Thursday to the rest of the world. I’ll be seeing you at TheNumerati.net.

I’m one of those people. I knew from the very first story that I wrote 25 years ago for the Viking, Loudoun Valley High School’s own monopoly of a newspaper, that journalism was for me. I liked trotting around the halls interviewing the lead cheerleader about tryouts (the most important event at school), chatting up the music teacher about the annual musical (of course we only had one) and taking pictures of the boys’ soccer team (who wouldn’t like that). I quickly figured out the three or four different paths you could take to get into journalism (work for a wire service; get an internship at Time or Newsweek; cover courts and cops for the local edition of a metropolitan paper), and the path that you would travel after that (be a writer, start editing, become a senior feature writer or editor, then retire). It all seems so quaint now.

I went the wire route, starting my career (ironically) at Bloomberg, a young startup and one of the few media joints hiring in the early 1990s. (And a place where the word “ironically” was banned from stories.) The thing about starting with a young company is you get a lot of opportunity. And my opportunity was to build from scratch their coverage of the Internet, starting with Netscape’s IPO. It was phenomenal to meet those people (Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen) when meeting them meant hanging out on couches at tiny conferences and talking about what all this Web stuff might turn into. It was 1994 and no one had a clue.

When I was hired by Bloomberg, the fellow hiring me asked me where I wanted to be in 5 years. He used to work at Businessweek (I know because it was one of the first things he told me when we sat down ) and so to impress him back, I said “Businessweek.” I soon figured out that that was actually a good idea and 3 years later I landed there, covering the Internet and continuing my love affair with emerging tech.

The environment at BW was incredible. Collegial, analytical, devoted to journalism. And that’s what I will miss. I could bore you all with stories of the past 12 years. But I’d rather discuss things that I am most thankful for.

First, just the opportunity to meet incredibly capable, thoughtful people and exchange ideas. Every time I got on the phone or sat in a conference room with someone from a startup or IBM or Amazon or what have you, I just felt privileged to be able to learn about something new. I was just as lucky to work with the fantastic group of folks here at BW. It’s hard to believe even now the level of conversation and analysis that I was exposed to here. I want to thank everyone who met with me or worked with me over the years for their patience, their insight, and their time.

Second, I’m thankful for the skills I learned. I am so lucky to have been able to learn to blog and podcast and use Twitter and be on Facebook for my job. I was literally paid to learn the skills that journalists need these days to thrive and given the foundation to consider new careers. And all of you helped me along, encouraging me and Steve to try new things, providing us with insight about different technologies and approaches to journalism. You taught us what we needed to know, whether it was evolving our thoughts about what journalism is or learning what new technology we should use.

Third, I’m thankful that I was able to explore an area that I am passionate about: clean tech and environmentalism. Now, with leaving Businessweek, I will have the opportunity to explore carving out a new career in that arena.

Fourth, I’m thankful that I was able to be a journalist. I loved writing, I loved the ethics, I loved grousing about how editors were asking for stupid new facts. I’ve been lucky to work at the kind of organization that really put a Chinese wall between journalists and advertising, that respected the work reporters did, and that hired the kind of people who did everything they could to make a story better.

I know that there is a lot more that I am forgetting right now. But, I let me just repeat, thank you all, within Businessweek and outside of it. And thank you Steve, for being the generous, warm, intelligent, and curious person that you are.

Heather and I both got the word on Thursday that we won’t be part of BusinessWeek once Bloomberg takes over, on Dec. 1. (We’re both pleased with this outcome, though it’s no picnic watching the staff get decimated, with good friends and colleagues heading off in every direction.) In the coming week, I think I’ll write a nice long eulogy for this blog.

But in the meantime, a question: Does anyone know how to preserve and store our four and a half years of blog posts and comments? Our colleague Arik Hesseldahl said something about turning each month into a pdf. I’ll look into that (as soon as I close my last story tomorrow). But you have a specific how-to, I’m all ears. As I wrote in September on my Numerati blog, I’m not sure how committed Bloomberg will be to social media. There’s no telling when someone might pull the plug on a server housing the archives of a discontinued blog.

Hugh Pickens writes “The AP reports that Texas’ attorney general, Greg Abbott, has opened an anti-trust investigation against Google spurred by complaints that the company has abused its power as the Internet’s dominant search engine. The review appears to be focused on whether Google is manipulating its search results to stifle competition. European regulators already have been investigating complaints alleging that Google has been favoring its own services in its results instead of rival websites and several lawsuits have also been filed in the US that have alleged Google’s search formula is biased. However Google believes Abbott is the first state attorney general to open an antitrust review into the issue.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

onreserve writes with an excerpt from a site dedicated to laws affecting wine: “[L]ast week, Australia signed an agreement with the European Union to comply with the geographical indicator (GI) system of the EU. The new agreement replaces an agreement signed in 1994 between the two wine powers and protects eleven of the EU drink labels and 112 of the Australian GI’s. Specifically, this means that many of the wine products produced in Australia that were previously labeled according to European names, such as sherry and tokay, will no longer be labeled under these names. Wine producers in Australia will have three years to ‘phase out’ the use of such names on labels. Australian labels that will be discontinued include amontillado, Auslese, burgundy, chablis, champagne, claret, marsala, moselle, port, and sherry.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cyrus writes “The online classified website Craigslist has removed its controversial Adult Services portion of its website. Technology blog TechCrunch was the first to report the section had been blacked out with the word ‘Censored.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes “Google Wave will morph into an application bundle for real-time collaboration, according to a blog post by Google Wave engineer Alex North. ‘We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we’ve already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and Web client into a more complete application or “Wave in a Box,”‘ North said, adding that the future of the recently flat-lined Google service will be ‘defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve,’ he said.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

coondoggie writes “NASA today said it had picked five experiments that will ride aboard one of its most ambitious space missions to explore the Sun. The Solar Probe, a car-sized spacecraft, is scheduled to launch no later than 2018 and will fly closer to the Sun’s surface than any other probe, NASA stated. Ultimately the spacecraft’s goals are to help scientists understand why the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system, NASA said.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.