Tomorrow's Newspapers Online 09-28-2013 | Sc

BlackBerry, which had warned of poor results on September 20, said its net loss for the second quarter ended on August 31 was $965 million, or $1.84 a share. Revenue fell 45 percent to $1.6 billion from a year earlier.

The loss included a writedown of about $934 million for unsold Z10 phones, a touchscreen model that the company had hoped would reverse its fading fortunes. The phone has sold badly with business and consumer customers alike.

"This write-off is very real," said Morningstar analyst Brian Colello. "They bought a lot of inventory hoping to sell it. The auditors were not convinced that BlackBerry can sell it or sell it at prices that the company was hoping for. We see no reason to be more optimistic than them."

Excluding the Z10 writedown and restructuring costs, BlackBerry reported a loss of $248 million, or 47 cents a share.

The company plans to shed 4,500 jobs, or more than one-third of its workforce, as it shrinks to focus on corporate and government customers. It will not host the typical post-results call for investors after signing a tentative $9-a-share agreement to be acquired by a consortium led by Fairfax Financial, its largest shareholder, on Monday.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company's steep revenue decline and mounting losses have revived fears that BlackBerry, a pioneer in the smartphone sector, faces an ignominious death.

"We are very disappointed with our operational and financial results this quarter and have announced a series of major changes to address the competitive hardware environment and our cost structure," Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins said in the earnings statement.

BlackBerry said Heins was available for an interview.

The company said it had sold 5.9 million mostly older-model phones in the quarter but only recognized revenue from 3.7 million, given that many sales had already been booked. By contrast, Apple Inc sold 9 million of its new iPhone 5c and 5s models in the three days after launch.

Shares of BlackBerry rose 2 percent to $8.11 in trading before the market opened. The stock remains far below Monday's bid price, indicating doubts that the Fairfax deal would be completed or a rival offer would emerge.

The wires could get tangled, and sometimes you had to make shelving out of a stack of milk crates. But only when the music was playing on those handpicked CDs, mix tapes or (geezer alert!) vinyl records did you move in the rest of your stuff. Daniel Rubio wouldn't know.

To the 23-year-old, new dorm rooms and new apartments have meant computers, iTunes, Pandora and miniature speakers.

"All I had to bring was my laptop. That's pretty much what everyone had," says Rubio, who attended Emory University in Atlanta and now works for a local marketing and communications firm. "It was actually pretty good sound. It would get the job done."

"Get the job done"? That sounds like the white flag for an era that used to be measured in woofers and tweeters, watts per channel and the size of your record collection.

Indeed, the days of the old-fashioned component stereo system are pretty much over, says Alan Penchansky, an audiophile and former columnist for the music trade publication Billboard.

"What's happened in the marketplace, the midmarket for audio has completely been obliterated," he says. "You have this high-end market that's getting smaller all the time, and then you've got the convenience market, which has taken over -- the MP3s, the Bluetooth devices, playing on laptops."

He wishes more people knew what they were missing. At its best, he says, audio reproduction has "a religious aspect." "There's a primacy to audio," he says. "It's a form of magic." Wires and jacks

Of course, new technology changes things all the time. When was the last time you bought a roll of film for your camera? Still, for a long time -- and for a certain, often youthful, audience -- the stereo system was a point of pride.

Greg Milner, the author of the audio recording history "Perfecting Sound Forever," remembers the process. There were components. There were boxes of tapes and CDs. There might even be some vinyl.

It could be a pain, no question. The equipment was heavy. There were all those wires, plugs and jacks -- Line In, Line Out, Aux, Phono, CD, keeping track of the positive and negative strands of speaker wire. It was an effort just to break down and set up the stuff, never mind moving it.

Milner, for example, grew up in Hawaii, and when he went away to school in Minnesota, he had to figure out what he was going to do with his system.

The new algorithm, codenamed Hummingbird, is the first major upgrade for three years.

It has already been in use for about a month, and affects about 90% of Google searches.

At a presentation on Thursday, the search giant was short on specifics but said Hummingbird is especially useful for longer and more complex queries.

Google stressed that a new algorithm is important as users expect more natural and conversational interactions with a search engine - for example, using their voice to speak requests into mobile phones, smart watches and other wearable technology. It is more capable of understanding concepts and the relationships between them rather than simply words, which leads to more fluid interactions. In that sense, it is an extension of Google's "Knowledge Graph" concept introduced last year aimed at making interactions more human.

In one example, shown at the presentation, a Google executive showed off a voice search through her mobile phone, asking for pictures of the Eiffel Tower. After the pictures appeared, she then asked how tall it was. After Google correctly spoke back the correct answer, she then asked "show me pictures of the construction" - at which point a list of images appeared.

Big payoffs?

However, one search expert cautioned that it was too early to determine Hummingbird's impact. "For me this is more of a coming out party, rather than making me think 'wow', said Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land.

"If you've been watching this space, you'd have already seen how they've integrated it into the [predictive search app] Google Now and conversational search.

"To know that they've put this technology further into their index may have some big payoffs but we'll just have to see how it plays out," Mr Sullivan said.

The news was announced at an intimate press event at the Silicon Valley garage where founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page worked on the launch of the search engine, which is fifteen years old on Friday.

He raises his hands to the monochrome keyboard and presses gently. A familiar strain emerges from it: the opening lines of the Dark Knight theme, but today it sounds unlike it has ever sounded before.

The 'Seaboard keyboard' is a tech forward interpretation of the piano, that attempts to reimagine what a keyboard can do. To test the device, CNN invited Zimmer to cast an expert eye over the British invention, and give a frank assessment of how it works.

"The Seaboard is really interesting," Zimmer says, "because you're forever trying to figure out how to make music more expressive. I've always been involved in music and technology and this is quite a relationship we're developing here ... we're trying to figure out how to get beyond the boundaries of technology that was invented 600 years ago or so."

Developed in the UK, the Seaboard is the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist inventor Roland Lamb. While studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, Lamb decided to create a new keyboard that he hoped would be more expressive than the piano.

"The piano was the first object I truly loved," Lamb says. "I played it all growing up ... but I became frustrated with its inability to modulate the timbre, and pitch and volume of each note. Essentially I was jealous of guitar players who could bend notes at will on a single note."

The Seaboard takes the basic layout of a piano but allows a player to 'bend' the sound of each note by using a range of different gestures that Lamb says are based very closely on the gestures people learn when they first pick up the piano. Moving a finger left on a key makes a note 'bend' downwards. Moving it right makes it go up a little.

Lamb believes that this opens up the expressive potential of the instrument, and serves to counter the "direct and unbending" nature of notes played on a piano.

Zimmer says that in this respect, Lamb has been successful: "It behaves much more the way you imagine as a human being you would want to interact with your notes. It doesn't have that stiff 'plunky' thing that a piano has. It automatically has a sort of sensuality to it ... Look, if Debussy or Ravel had had one of these I think their music would have been X-rated."

In a statement from Damascus on Friday, the United Nations said inspectors probing the attacks had returned to Syria on Wednesday and expected to finalize their work on Monday on a report to be issued by late October. The United States and its allies say an initial U.N. report that said sarin gas was used on August 21 showed government forces were responsible.

Syria has denied that and accuses rebels of releasing gas. The United Nations itself has not assigned blame. The three most recent incidents it is looking into were in Bahhariyeh and Jobar, both east of central Damascus, on August 22 and 24, and Ashrafiat Sahnaya to the southwest of the capital on August 25.

The U.N. gave no further details of the latest incidents.

The outskirts of Damascus have seen some of the heaviest fighting in recent months. At least 20 people were killed and dozens wounded by a car bomb on Friday in the town of Rankus, 30 km (20 miles) to the north, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

From Tuesday, experts from international watchdog the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will begin inspecting Syria's stockpile of toxic munitions, under the terms of a deal struck this month to avert U.S. military action.

A draft agreement on the stockpile inspections, obtained by Reuters and due to be voted on by OPCW member states in The Hague late on Friday, calls on members of to make cash donations to fund Syria's fast-tracked destruction operation.

The 41-member executive council of the OPCW is due to discuss and vote on the proposal at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT). It needs a simple majority to be passed, but decisions at the body are normally agreed upon by consensus.

U.S. President Barack Obama had prepared to attack President Bashar al-Assad's forces in response to the August 21 gassing. Faced with resistance in Congress, he accepted a proposal from Assad's Russian ally to refrain from strikes in return for Syria giving up its chemical arsenal by the middle of next year.

KILLINGS

Next month's U.N. report on the previous instances of gas being used will give more details of the August 21 incident. Other incidents include one in March in the northern town of Khan al-Assal, where authorities say rebels killed 25 people, including 16 soldiers. Rebels said government forces were behind it.

The Microsoft founder says the triple-key login should have been made easier, à la Apple's Macs, but that a designer insisted on the more complicated step.

"We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button," Gates said Saturday during a question-and-answer session to launch a Harvard University fund-raising campaign. His comments have gained attention since a video of his Harvard Q&A was posted on YouTube on Tuesday.

Smiling, Gates tried to follow through on the thought, noting it was a basic security feature. But he eventually surrendered to common sense.

"And so we had ... we programmed at a low level that you had to ... it was a mistake," he said, throwing up his hands to laughter and applause from the crowd. Gates defended innovation on the earliest Microsoft software though.

"We did some clever stuff," he said. "We were able to experiment with a lot of stuff, but more on the software side than the hardware." Long the first interface step for PC users, Control-Alt-Delete still exists in Windows 8 as a way of either locking the computer or accessing the control panel. While the system defaults to a log-in screen, users may tweak their settings to return to the old way of logging on to Windows.

Sometimes informally called the "three-fingered salute," the login required users to use both hands and was intended to avoid accidental keystrokes from rebooting a computer. Engineer David Bradley, a designer on early IBM computers, said he invented the combination as a shortcut during development.

"I originally intended for it to be what we would now call an Easter egg -- just something we were using in development and it wouldn't be available elsewhere," Bradley said while appearing on a 2011 panel that included Gates. "But then (software publishers) found out about it. They were trying to figure out how to tell somebody to start up one of their programs, and they had the answer. Just put the diskette in, hit Control-Alt-Delete, and by magic your program starts."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report that the current hiatus in warming, when temperatures have risen more slowly despite growing emissions, was a natural variation that would not last.

It said the Earth was set for more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels that could swamp coasts and low-lying islands as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere.

Many world leaders called for stronger action to rein in rising greenhouse gas emissions and limit a rise in temperatures to within manageable limits after the report, which estimated that humanity has burnt more than half the available carbon.

The study, meant to guide governments in shifting towards greener energies, said it was "extremely likely", a probability of at least 95 percent, that human activities were the dominant cause of warming since the mid-20th century.

That was an increase from "very likely", or 90 percent, in the last report in 2007 and "likely", 66 percent, in 2001.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the study was a call for governments, many of which have been focused on spurring weak growth rather than fighting climate change, to work to agree a planned U.N. accord in 2015 to combat global warming.

"The heat is on. Now we must act," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report was a wake-up call. "Those who deny the science or choose excuses over action are playing with fire," he said, referring to skeptics who question the need for urgent action.

They have become emboldened after temperatures rose more slowly over the last 15 years despite increasing greenhouse gas emissions, especially in emerging nations led by China.

DOCTOR

European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said it was time to treat the Earth's health. "If your doctor was 95 percent sure you had a serious disease, you would immediately start looking for the cure," she said.

Compiled from the work of hundreds of scientists, the report faces extra scrutiny this year after its 2007 predecessor included an error that exaggerated the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers. An outside review later found that the mistake did not affect its main conclusions.

The report said the trend of the past 15 years was skewed by the fact that 1998, at the start of the period, was an extremely warm year with an El Nino event in the Pacific that can disrupt weather worldwide.

This is an indication that the planning for the attack began more than a year ago. Al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based terrorist group with links to al Qaeda, has said it carried out the attack.

In addition to five terrorists, at least 67 people are confirmed dead in the attack. Officials fear that number could rise -- as many as 63 people are still unaccounted for -- as they sift through the rubble left from the collapse of three floors of the expansive facility.

Near the Ugandan border, authorities picked up three people in connection with the mall attack investigation, the Kenyan intelligence official said.

The three are among several people now being held and questioned by police over the attack Saturday at the Westgate mall.

Amit Singhal, senior vice president of search, told reporters on Thursday that the company launched its latest "Hummingbird" algorithm about a month ago and that it currently affects 90 percent of worldwide searches via Google.

Google is trying to keep pace with the evolution of Internet usage. As search queries get more complicated, traditional "Boolean" or keyword-based systems begin deteriorating because of the need to match concepts and meanings in addition to words.

"Hummingbird" is the company's effort to match the meaning of queries with that of documents on the Internet, said Singhal from the Menlo Park garage where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin conceived their now-ubiquitous search engine.

"Remember what it was like to search in 1998? You'd sit down and boot up your bulky computer, dial up on your squawky modem, type in some keywords, and get 10 blue links to websites that had those words," Singhal wrote in a separate blogpost.

"The world has changed so much since then: billions of people have come online, the Web has grown exponentially, and now you can ask any question on the powerful little device in your pocket."

After presentation at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference, Sprint CFO Joe Euteneur said his company would take a "wait-and-see" approach before making any decisions on BlackBerry, the struggling Canadian smartphone maker that has seen demand for its devices shrink rapidly and is narrowing its marketing efforts to businesses.

Euteneur acknowledged that Sprint may not want to rock the boat among business customers, which have typically been the biggest fans of BlackBerry smartphones.

On Wednesday, No. 4 U.S. wireless operator T-Mobile US told Reuters it would no longer stock BlackBerry Ltd phones in its stores, but would ship the devices to any consumers who come in to order a BlackBerry.

While T-Mobile is primarily known for serving consumers, Sprint has a long history of supplying businesses with cellphones particularly on its iDen network, which came from an acquisition of Nextel in 2005.

At the end of June Sprint shut down the Nextel network, which was based on out-dated technology. It is instead focusing its efforts on modernizing the original Sprint network.

But Sprint has lost customers of both networks as a result of the shutdown. Companies that used the iDen network, are also moving their workers from the Sprint network.

Bigger U.S. operators Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc both still sell BlackBerry phones in their stores.

Lowell McAdam, Chief Executive of Verizon Communications told Reuters this week that any Verizon Wireless decision about BlackBerry would depend on its customers' wishes.

Elop announced earlier this month that Nokia (NOK) had inked a 5.4 billion euro ($7.2 billion) deal to sell its mobile phone business to Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500). The takeover -- considered a win-win for each company -- also stipulated that Elop would move to Microsoft.

That's when the trouble began.

Nokia then amended its employment contract with Elop, ensuring he received the large payout when he leaves, even though his previous contract would not have allowed the payment.

Elop's windfall will be paid by both Microsoft and Nokia, with Nokia paying 30% of the tab and Microsoft picking up the rest. The move, which caused shock and anger to ripple through Nokia's Finnish homeland, created an uncomfortable situation for the firm's chairman and interim CEO, Risto Siilasmaa.

According to reports, pressure from the community led Siilasmaa to privately ask Elop to forgo part or all of his payment package, though Elop is reported to have declined, explaining that he was in the midst of divorcing his wife. Nokia would not comment on this development.

Elop, who previously worked at Microsoft before taking the helm at Nokia, is widely expected to succeed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer when he retires. Though Elop wasn't able to turnaround the struggling Nokia, Microsoft is surely hoping he'll have more luck once he's back in the States.

The uncompromising language