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You know where to apply….

While Unisys won’t confirm that it placed the advertisement, the odds of it being Accenture or another large consulting firm are somewhat remote. But then, so is the location. Imagine getting paid $250,000 to do a great job in a great location.

Not bad for telling people how to give and use free software.

commentary

Unisys apparently wants someone to become its open source expert for Asia-Pacific, and is willing to pay a handsome price for it. $250,000 Australian dollars, which works out to roughly $240,000 US dollars.

• Antec’s open-air PC case let the sun shine in.

• HDTV prices: how low can they go?

• The big Storm finally made landfall, and CNET’s Bonnie Cha braved the elements to file a detailed report (see video above).

• If you’re into world domination, you may want one of these.

• Asus’ Eee PC went premium and got touchy.

• Renting Blu-ray on Netflix? It’ll cost you.

• Don’t forget: we’ll be on hand to cover every word of Apple’s October 14 event–even if the invite gave us a pretty clear idea of what Jobs and Co. will be talking about.

Too busy getting stock-market-induced whiplash this week to stay up on Crave? No worries, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a look back at some of the truly interesting, strange, and wonderfully silly stories we Craved.

See anything we missed? Got a gadget tip we should know about? Drop us a line at crave dot cnet dot com. And have a great weekend!

(Credit:
Antec)

Antec's open-air case lets you breathe easy.

As the top four recording companies continue to see CD sales shrink and as they scurry to find profitable business models in the digital age, Walt Disney Records has grown 40 percent from last year according to Matt Fitz-Henry, the label’s director of New Media.

Fitz-Henry, who spoke at a panel session at the iHollywood Conference on Monday, said that it’s no secret how the company has found success in such a gloomy environment.

“The Internet is not only an important piece of our business, it’s relevance continues to expand,” Fitz-Henry said. Disney is focusing now on promoting acts in mobile by creating widgets that include audio, video, tour dates, Webisodes and photos.

Walt Disney's music label is expanding the Web presence of popular shows, such as Hannah Montana

A 360 deal is the practice of promoting an artist across different entertainment genres and platforms, including the Web.

For example, Walt Disney Records oversees much of the work of Miley Ray Cyrus, of Hannah Montana fame.

Another important ingredient is partnering with acts that appeal to children or tween-agers, a group that isn’t likely to pirate the content. Some of the other properties on the label include franchises such as High School Musical and Camp Rock featuring the The Jonas Brothers.

According to Nielsen Soundscan, High School Musical 2 was the seventh largest selling digital album of 2007.

LOS ANGELES–Only the mouse appears to thrive in a music sector pulverized by digital technology.

Besides the TV show, Cyrus has released CDs, draws huge crowds of screaming young girls to her concerts and is scheduled to appear in Hannah Montana: The Movie. According to a story in Adweek, one of her two Web sites drew more than 280,000 unique visitors in April.

“What everybody in the music business is now talking about is the 360-deal,” Fitz-Henry said. “The Disney company has been doing that for 50 years.”

(Credit:
Walt Disney Records)

Note that Liquid TV doesn’t offer internal support for Internet bells and whistles found on TiVo boxes–stuff like Amazon Video-on-Demand, TiVoCasts, podcast support, Internet radio, and so forth. But since you’re already using a computer, all of that would be superfluous, anyway. Its absence isn’t much of a loss.

Liquid TV will be available in two versions. The $200 package includes a standard TiVo remote, USB DTV tuner/antenna (for over-the-air analog and digital TV, including HD broadcasts), and an IR blaster (for controlling external cable and satellite boxes, which would then be fed into a video capture card on your PC). The $100 package is software only; it’s for people who already have a TV tuner card and remote solution (or who will opt for the software’s onscreen mouse controls).

So, what are the potential drawbacks? If Liquid TV is like other TiVo products, content providers or broadcasters could use program “flags” to make it impossible for certain shows to be transferred to DVD or portable (or recorded at all). But the bigger problem could be the HD issue for anyone not using an over-the-air antenna source. If you want to record a program from your cable or satellite box–for something not over-the-air like HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, USA, ESPN–most PCs only allow standard-definition video capture (composite or S-Video). To get HD quality, there are only two possibilities: capturing the HD video output stream from the external cable/satellite box, or getting a PC with internal CableCard support. Unfortunately, peripherals and PCs with hardware support for either solution remain rare.

(Credit:
Nero)

Starting in October 2008, however, people can turn their Windows PCs into a full-on TiVo DVR thanks to Nero’s new Liquid TV package. The software effectively turns a standard PC into a full-service TiVo DVR, replete with the same interface, program guide, and ease-of-use as TiVo’s standalone hardware DVRs–but with the added ability to burn recorded shows to DVD or export them to portable devices such as the iPod or PlayStation Portable.

The software is said to support up to four TV tuners, one of which can be an external set-top box. Both versions include a year’s worth of the all-important TiVo service (required for use). Nero hasn’t officially set the renewal fee for the service, but company reps suggested that it will be less than the $13 per month that’s the baseline for owners of the set-top TiVo boxes.

The other big advantage of the PC-based TiVo experience is DVD burning and portable device transfer. Yes, both of these features are available with standard TiVos with that company’s TiVo To Go add-on software (and a compatible DVD-burning software package). But transferring the recordings over your home network and then transcoding them is a long and laborious process. The transcoding and compression phases still take time with Liquid TV. But because the recordings are already on the hard drive, things go a lot faster, and the processes can go on in the background as you continue to watch other recordings or live TV. (It’s the closest thing to products like the Pioneer DVR-810H and Humax DRT800, which were among our favorite TiVo-powered set-top devices when they were first released.)

Is Liquid TV worth buying? If PC makers could make it easier to get an external HD cable feed, I think it would eliminate the product’s biggest red flag. Also, competing products like SnapStream’s Beyond TV already offer built-in support for antenna HD recording, DVD burning, and transfer to portable devices. Still, the ability to get a true TiVo interface, the TiVo remote, and the necessary accessories and dongles in one box–along with a year of service–could well make Nero Liquid TV a compelling PC DVR option for many.

(Credit:
Nero)

The software includes built-in support for DVD burning and transfer to portable devices.

Traditionally, anyone who wanted to convert a PC into a DVR was limited to the likes of Windows Media Center, SnapStream Beyond TV, or (for the more adventurous DIYers) MythTV.

If you don't want to use the remote, an onscreen interface can be controlled by the mouse.

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Nero)

Nero provided CNET with a quick demo of Liquid TV last week. While the company-run demo was brief (and strictly under Nero’s control), it appeared to confirm that Liquid TV is almost a straight PC port of the TiVo experience. All of TiVo’s standard TV-recording functionality looked to be onboard–pause and rewind live TV, commercial skip, Season Pass, WishList, search, and even KidZone.

The software’s fairly muscular system requirements will preclude its running on older PCs, but the advantage is a big increase in speed and responsiveness compared with recent TiVo hardware. The software also has a control overlay, so you can easily control it with the PC’s pointing device if you’re sitting at the desk (instead of sitting on a sofa, for instance).

Pro BMX rider Aaron Ross partnered with Odyssey to produce this signature BMX set that features a clever keyboard pattern spelling out the name of the rider.

The full set includes two-piece, multibutted chromoly bars; a set of 145 millimeter Krayton Rubber grips; and a special T-shirt all bearing the same design. Available now on DansComp or the Odyssey’s Web site.

(Credit:
Odyssey) (Credit:
Odyssey) (Credit:
Odyssey)

(Credit:
Odyssey)

(Via Art of Trackstand)

Who said nerds eat onlyjunk, never exercise, and rack up 1-900 bills while living in their parents’ pool houses? Well, now we know at least one of those isn’t true.

Pics of the full set after the jump.

Velocity Interactive Group, an investment firm that concentrates on the digital media sector, has hired Jorge Espinel as an investment partner for activities in digital publishing, digital video, social media, games, and online advertising.

Espinel most recently led AOL’s corporate strategy, mergers, and acquisitions work, where he oversaw acquisition of companies including Tacoda, Third Screen Media, AdTech, Truveo, Userplane, and Advertising.com, Velocity said.

SugarCRM has landed a $20 million venture investment round, designed to boost international expansion by the maker of open-source customer relationship management software, the company said Thursday.

The company plans to use the funds for not only research and development, but also increasing its global footprint–particularly in Europe and Asia.

Taking the lead on the funding was New Enterprise Associates, with existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International joining in. That brings SugarCRM’s total funding to $46 million.

SugarCRM, founded in 2004, released its Sugar 5.0 software in December. To date, the company has racked up over 4 million downloads of its commercial open-source CRM goodies and counts more than 60,000 community members.

With its infusion of funds, SugarCRM will have more leeway as it heads down the path toward an IPO within the next two years. But with the recent industry consolidation–case in point being Sun Microsystems’ planned $1 billion merger with MySQL–SugarCRM may find that option just as tasty.

The numbers themselves will probably come out around 1:15 p.m., and we’ll get something up quickly after they are released.

Come back to CNET News.com at 2 p.m. PDT (although we sincerely hope you never leave) for a live blog of Apple’s second-quarter earnings conference call.

The key things to look out for are
Mac shipments,
iPhone momentum, and Apple’s forecast for the next quarter, which tends to dictate how the investment community responds to the earnings reports. Reporters are not allowed to ask questions during the calls, only the financial analysts are granted that privilege, which usually means you have to sit through a couple of minutes of “great quarter, guys.”

I haven’t raised this particular issue with people at Microsoft, but a couple of years ago- when I was researching a story for The New York Times on technology energy hogs, the standard response from folks in Redmond was to blame third party applications and drivers for the fact that Windows machines often fail to properly go to or wake up from from sleep mode. Third party applications may very well be to blame, but it’s no excuse. One of Windows strongest selling points is its ability to work with software and hardware from thousands of sources so it seems to me that a company with the resources and experience of Microsoft should have by now figured out how to handle errant programs and drivers.

I do like many of the improvements in Windows 7 and appreciate that it boots a little faster and–at least on my machine–seems better at going to sleep and waking up. Now all I want is the ability to turn off the darn machine and terminate a misbehaving program without having to dedicate my entire afternoon to the task.

I can understand why it takes at least some time for a PC to boot from a power-off situation because the operating system and some software and drivers have to be copied from storage into memory. But I can’t understand why it takes more than a few seconds for the computer or one of its applications to shut down. I realize that sometimes there is a bit of housekeeping to do in the form of closing files but–give me a break–should that really have to take up to five minutes? And there have been countless times in my experience when it simply never shuts down, forcing me to hold the power button for several seconds. I’ve even had laptops that were so stubborn that I had to remove the battery to turn them off.

And by the way, I’m not just talking about Windows XP and Vista. I’m having the same problem with
Windows 7, though, to be fair, the new operating system is still in beta so it’s possible that Microsoft could amaze and delight me by fixing this in the final version.

I’m particularly annoyed at how Windows often fails to terminate programs that have crashed. In theory, pressing Ctrl Alt and Delete to bring up the Task Manager followed by clicking End Task should simply stop the program and return you to the operating system. But that doesn’t always work. Sometimes the program just hangs there forever, sometimes it quits after a random period of time and sometimes the entire computer just crashes. Imagine if you had a lamp in your house that was malfunctioning and the only way to turn it off was to turn off all the power to your house from the main breaker.

Back in the old days when TVs and radios had tubes, it took a couple of minutes for a set to warm up before you could watch or listen. But even then, you could turn it off instantly. That’s not true with Windows PCs. Not only does it sometimes take seemingly forever for them to boot, but it can take several minutes for one to shut down. Even worse, if a program stops responding, you may or may not be able to shut it down. And even if it does terminate, it may take awhile.

Via Technologies is shipping samples of the new Isaiah processor targeted at low-cost compact computers.

Other differences include: Atom uses a more simple “in-order execution” design compared to Isaiah’s Superscalar, out-of-order design. Because of this more sophisticated design, Isaiah may deliver higher performance than Atom, though independent benchmarking will be the final judge.

Via Isaiah Architecture die plot

Correction: Isaiah’s TDP (Thermal Design Power or power envelope) is not confirmed at this point. However Henry said that Isaiah will consumer more power than Intel’s Atom processor.

Via will need all the technological advantage it can muster just to avoid getting buried by Intel’s marketing juggernaut. Intel is “formidable but won’t take it all. We’ve already got design wins. The cost to a manufacturer to change their whole design is quite high unless there’s some real benefit to it,” Henry said.

Samples of the Isaiah-architecture-based x86 chips are now being shipped “aggressively” to customers with a release timeframe of May-June, said Glenn Henry, CEO of Centaur Technology, the Via subsidiary that designed the chip. The first generation of Isaiah-based products will be pin-compatible with the C7 processor family and offer two to four times the performance, according to Henry. Fujitsu is manufacturing the chip.

Via is also planning a dual-core version of Isaiah but Henry would not provide any more details.

Henry also noted that Intel is following Via into the low-cost, small-device market–where Via has been a player for many years–not the other way around.

(Credit:
Via Technologies)

Via’s current C7 processor is already used by Everex in its CloudBook, by OQO in the Model 02, and by Hewlett-Packard in thin-client computers and in certain models that the computer maker sells in China. Both the C7 and Isaiah are x86-compatible processors, meaning they can run the same software that Intel amd AMD chips do.

Isaiah is targeted specifically at the low-cost “thin-and-light notebook area,” Henry said. The same market segment that Intel is targeting for the upcoming Atom “Silverthorne” processor. (Intel prefers to call this segment “netbooks.”)