There Really Are Sounds Only Teens Can Hear

Every once in a while, a true story gets tagged as an urban legend because it seems so unbelievable ...

Stephanie Dunnewind of the Seattle Times has set the record straight on one of them:

A high-pitched sound originally intended to annoy teens has now turned into a "secret" ring tone that old folks -- those over 20 or 30, anyway -- can't hear.

While age-related hearing loss -- called presbycusis -- mostly hits those over age 60, even people just out of their teens can have trouble hearing the highest frequencies (18 to 20 kilohertz), according to Compound Security Systems. The British company's "ultrasonic teenage deterrent," the Mosquito, emits an annoying high-pitched sound that only teens can hear to discourage loitering outside businesses.

Enterprising teens -- realizing a benefit to making their cellphones, in effect, audibly invisible -- turned the un-sound into a ring tone. Now the company also pitches an "official" Mosquito ring tone (it can be downloaded in the U.S. from for $2.99).

"We suggest you find the highest-pitched one that you are able to hear and use that to give yourself the best chance of fooling the adults," advises Ultrasonic Ringtones, which lets visitors hear (and download) different tones.

"Fooling the adults" would be a reference to the parents and teachers who don't realize students are receiving text messages when phones are supposed to be turned off.

If nothing else, it's an amusing test to play different tones to see how kids react. "Ow ow! It's hurting my ears!" moaned one 12-year-old, futilely trying to plug them, while this adult sat blissfully unaware.

Bitter Battle Brewing Over Smiley Face

Abigail Goldman of the Los Angeles Times reports on one of our time's delicious little ironies ...

For decades, the yellow happy-face symbol has encouraged millions to smile.

The smiley face and "Have a Nice Day" helped to define the '70s. With two dots and a pencil stroke, schoolchildren have brightened handwritten messages by filling in their O's with minismileys. These days, nary a cheery e-mail is complete without a typographical smile.

But a bitter legal battle over smiley could be enough to make the happy little symbol frown.

Wal-Mart Stores, which uses a yellow happy face to try to put its shoppers in a carefree mood, is saying -- with a straight face -- that it has exclusive rights to the familiar image, at least among retail department stores.

The world's largest retailer is fighting a French native who has earned millions in licensing fees on smileys since the early 1970s, when he began securing trademarks for the happy face around the world.

It's the case of Mr. Smiley v. "le smiley."

The two sides are expected to wrap up their cases before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this summer.

Even the retailer's recent decision to drop Mr. Smiley from its advertising as part of its larger attempt to appeal to more upscale shoppers hasn't dulled Wal-Mart's fighting spirit.

If Wal-Mart prevails, it could keep its competitors from festooning the symbol on plastic bags, name badges and just about anything else sold in stores.

The Frenchman, Franklin Loufrani, responded bluntly, without a happy face: No comment.

But Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley, not to be confused with "smiley," was happy to.

"It is kind of ironic that this whole dispute is about a smiley face," he said. "But in the end, it is what it is: It's a mark that we have a tremendous investment in and is very closely identified with our company."

Wal-Mart has invested billions of dollars through the years, Simley said, linking its name to the yellow circle with two dots for eyes and a loopy grin.

The company says it has been using what it calls "Mr. Smiley" since 1996 and in more limited ways long before that. But the company didn't move to register the trademark until someone else threatened to do so first, Simley said.

That was Loufrani, who began registering the face around the world more than 30 years ago and set up a company in London, SmileyWorld, to police its use.

Many people have claimed to have invented smiley. But the man widely credited with creating smiley was the late Harvey Ball, a Massachusetts graphic artist who was commissioned by an insurer in 1963 to reduce bad blood among employees after the company merged with a rival.

The original concept was just for the smile. Ball told the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, Mass., in 1997 that he added the eyes so that a disgruntled employee couldn't turn the smile upside-down to make a frown.

For his efforts, Ball earned little more than a song and a smile: $45.

By the time Ball thought to copyright the design in the 1970s, his happy face had been reproduced at least 50 million times, making it part of the public domain. Loufrani, who has claimed that he created "le smiley" after the 1968 student riots in Paris as a way to designate positive news stories, has trademarked the symbol in at least 80 countries, his lawyer said.

It wasn't until 1997 that Loufrani applied to control the symbol in the United States. The patent office told him he couldn't claim the yellow happy face, ruling that the mark was a widely used decorative symbol. So Loufrani went ahead with a request to trademark the word "smiley" along with the symbol.

Wal-Mart said it had no choice but to oppose Loufrani and seek to register Mr. Smiley for its use. Loufrani, in turn, filed legal papers opposing Wal-Mart's claim.

"For those of us who just live in the world, maybe it looks silly, but for those who are reaping a financial benefit, I think it's very important," said Steven Baron, Loufrani's Chicago-based attorney.

Although all of this may sound a bit like registering sunshine or rainbows -- trade marking a ubiquitous symbol isn't necessarily frowned on, legal experts said.

Neil Netanel, a law-school professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and expert in copyright and trademark law, noted that apples are ubiquitous but that it didn't stop Apple Computer from registering its name or famous rainbow-colored trademark.

It is a context more recently that raised the hackles The Beatles' Apple Corps, which has claimed that the computer company shouldn't be allowed to use the mark to sell music. But that's a different trademark suit.

The difficulty for Wal-Mart could be in trying to prove that Mr. Smiley is distinctive and that most people associate the yellow happy face with the giant retailer.

"It seems to me that when people walk around with a shirt with a smiley face on it, it's because they like the smiley face, it's not because they associate it with a company," Netanel said. "The value of it isn't in the goodwill of the company; it's that people like the illustration."

'Slow Food' Is Fast Becoming a Trend

Josh Lintereur of the Skagit Valley Herald takes a look at a possible return to quality over convenience in casual dining ...

MOUNT VERNON, Wa -- In an eat-on-the-go culture bulging with drive-through windows and frozen dinners, a Skagit County group has decided to slow things down and rediscover the pleasure of food, drink and good company.

The group is armed with picnic baskets, place settings and plentiful appetites for savory, non-fast-food cuisine.

Not a single hot dog, hamburger or potato chip showed up on the table during the inaugural potluck last month at the Rexville Grocery. Instead, group members dined on ling cod caught fresh the same day and oysters marinated the night before in brown sugar, soy sauce, ginger and green onion and smoked that morning.

With that bountiful feast, the "slow-food" movement officially arrived in Skagit County.

Meant as the antithesis of fast food, slow food is an international trend started in the mid-1980s in Italy as a reaction to the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Rome.

Today, slow food has evolved into a self-described "eco-gastronomic" nonprofit organization that celebrates local food traditions and sustainability through educational events and outreach activities, all with the aim of fighting the homogenization of food.

The 80,000-member organization is divided into local chapters, called conviviums. This is Skagit County's first convivium, called Slow Food Skagit River Salish Sea.

"Slow food covers everything from supporting the local economy to encouraging families to sit down together for dinner," said Donald Harper, who helped found the local convivium. "The goal is to support the producers and artisans, but it's also about the pleasures of the table."

"I really believe slow food will be big here," said Stuart Welch, the Rexville Grocery owner who hosted the group's first official dinner.

Elsewhere, the slow-food movement is helping to revitalize 147 distinct foods in the United States that have all but disappeared from the culinary landscape.

"We've basically identified endangered foods and we're working to promote them and bring them back to the marketplace," said Deena Goldman, the director of membership at Slow Food USA in Brooklyn, NY.

In Seattle, slow-food members are working to resurrect the Ozette potato, which came from Peru by way of Spanish explorers and into the hands of the Makah Tribe at Neah Bay in the 1700s, said Gerry Warren, who helped establish slow food in the Northwest around 10 years ago.

The potatoes were used for around 200 years before they began fading away, he said. Today, they're only available in seed form.

Amateur Fight Videos Are an Online 'Hit'

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post appears to have found life imitating art in a most unusual manner ...

Who would have thought The Fight Club would serve as a role model? But, here it is, proving that even when truth emulates fiction, it is still stranger than fiction:

Every now and then, Blake Cater gets an appetite for a fight. There's something about a brawl that gets his adrenaline pumping. So with a few of his friends, he goes into his back yard and has at it. And invites the world to watch.

Armed with a digital video camera, Cater and his friends tape their slugfests and post them on video-sharing Web sites, including Cater's Myspace.com page. The images tell a succinct, brutal story — punches landing squarely on jaws, fists flattening noses, neck-straining headlocks followed by jackhammer storms of more blows to the face.

Cater says no one has been badly injured — hey, these guys are friends — although participants can usually count on some bloody lips, sore knuckles and a few bruised egos. "I'm not in any way a violent person," says Cater, 22, of Burlington, N.C., "but I enjoy getting out there and fighting when I can."

There's more where that came from. Lots more. The convergence of cheap cellphone and digital cameras, easy-to-use video-sharing Web sites and good old human anarchy has created a whole subgenre: the amateur fight video, now playing all over the Internet. On such sites as YouTube.com or Google Video, you'll increasingly find a treasure-trove — or a cesspool — of people beating on other people, caught on tape by passersby, friends and other photographers. Some of the violence is consensual. Most of it isn't.

Taken together, the fights might be America's unfunniest home videos, an archive of human aggression or a catalog of stupidity and senselessness. They're also documents of dangerous and illegal behavior, since fighting in public is typically a felony. Although the combatants in fight clips are rarely identified, let alone arrested or punished, fight videos occasionally pop up on the police blotter.

These were not fun

In Arlington, Texas, police arrested six men and boys, allegedly members of a gang called Playas After Cash, for arranging street fights and selling DVDs of the mayhem over the Internet; a 16-year-old participant in one of the recorded fights was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage.

And in April, a seven-minute video of two girls fighting in Fresno, Calif. — while one of the girls' mothers watched — led to a flurry of news reports and a police investigation of the mother for child endangerment (the girls were suspended from school).

There are grainy videos of men belting, head-butting and kicking other men, and shaky camera shots of girls and women hitting, scratching and stomping each other. The soundtrack is usually the excited voices of spectators, but many of the clips have been set to music (usually hip-hop or thrash metal). Most are devoid of context or explanation, or even provocation.

The settings are anyplace and everywhere. One arm-flailing fight takes place between surfers offshore. And a three-minute video of a Russian street brawl appears to pit two small armies of young men. As the camera rolls, the two mobs move toward each other at a slow walk, then combust into anarchy.

In interviews, representatives of video-sharing Web sites seemed only vaguely aware that fight videos are being posted on their services. A few even needed the concept explained to them.

All the major Web services employ teams of people to scour user postings and remove objectionable material. But since nudity and sexually oriented videos command the most attention, violence often slips past.

Google Video has no specific prohibition on clips featuring fighting, but Peter Chane, business products manager for the site, says his company will flag videos "in which someone is hurt or someone dies."

Except that the extent of injuries in fight videos isn't always clear; some videos show brawls that leave participants motionless and apparently unconscious. "We try to be as open as possible," Chane says. "Our No. 1 goal is to get as much content online as possible, as long as it doesn't offend."

YouTube, the most popular file-sharing site (it receives about 40,000 homemade videos a day), says it leaves the flagging to its users. The site bans those who've been repeatedly cited for inappropriate postings. But its rules about violent videos are vague.

"It's all subject to what the community (of YouTube users) feels is appropriate," says Julie Supan, senior director of marketing. She adds: "We've removed a lot of fights (because of user complaints). This service has a very broad demographic of users, and we're focused on making it an enjoyable place for everyone."

They don't hold back

A quick scan of YouTube suggests it can be a pretty rough place. Here's a video of a preadolescent girl smacking another girl repeatedly in the face. Here's an ugly schoolyard fight, labeled "Mississippi Brawl."

The Mississippi video is one of about 500 fight videos collected by Phil Peplinski, 46, a martial-arts instructor in central Florida. Peplinski maintains a Web site (ComeGetYouSome.com) that contains a portion of his collection and acts as a kind of magnet for fight fanatics and fight tapers.

Peplinski says the point of the site isn't lurid entertainment, but rather instruction. "Most people have never been in a [physical] confrontation," he says. "They have difficulty understanding true violence. I'm hoping people will learn what to do when faced with the real thing."

What they should do, he says, is "walk away."

What Would Happen if the US Did Leave Iraq?

Celestine Bohlen of Bloomberg News reviews a book that postulates an answer to a question that more and more Americans are asking ...

"The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End"
by Peter W. Galbraith
Simon & Schuster, 260 pp., $26

Peter Galbraith, a sometime U.S. diplomat, journalist and foreign-policy analyst, has a solution to stop the ever-widening cyclone of sectarian violence that has engulfed Iraq and made a mockery of U.S. goals there.

Let the country fall apart, he writes in "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End." That, he says, is the only way to give the region the framework it needs to restore stability in the post-Saddam Hussein era.

To a large extent, that has already happened. The Kurds have effectively had their own state since 1991, when the U.S. guaranteed their security with a no-fly zone after the first Gulf War. Farther to the south, Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis are now pulling away from each other, even as they carry out increasingly horrible vendettas. Eight of Iraq's nine southern provinces are dominated by the country's main Shiite party.

Galbraith's book tracks his own itinerary through the Iraq story. His first trip was in 1987 when, as a U.S. Senate staffer, he witnessed Saddam's murderous policies against the Kurds, the country's largest minority.

He is not a man to hide his agenda. In 1991, Galbraith broke the Senate staff's code of silence with a public campaign to rescue Iraq's Kurdish population from the wrath of Saddam's army. As U.S. ambassador to Croatia from 1993 to 1998, he showed an obvious sympathy for the Croats as they sought to even the score with the Serbs during the Yugoslav war.

Return to Iraq

Galbraith returned to Iraq several times before 2003, when he went to cover the Iraq war for ABC from the region under Kurdish control. His book is unabashedly pro-Kurdish independence, justified because of their suffering under Arab rule and by the success of their autonomous regional government.

He's got no use at all for the U.S. administrators in Iraq, particularly L. Paul Bremer, who became head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2003. In Galbraith's telling, the CPA chief matched his overlords in Washington in his ignorance and arrogance, relying largely on an inexperienced staff, including young recruits from right-wing think tanks. A 24-year-old former White House aide without legal experience helped negotiate the Transitional Administrative Law (which was later largely ignored).

The incompetence and even corruption on display during the first two years continue to haunt Iraq, Galbraith writes. In the meantime, the U.S. clings to an illusion of a united Iraq, which he says flies in the face of the deepening distrust among the country's three major communities.

Federalism

In Galbraith's view, the new Iraqi Constitution, adopted by referendum on Oct. 15, 2005, helped create a loose federalism that works -- at least for now. What isn't working, he argues, is the U.S. presence, which has not only failed to provide security but is a lightning rod for suicide bombers.

When it comes to a formula for pulling out U.S. troops, Galbraith's analysis is a bit tenuous, and even disingenuous. He argues that Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who dominated the country under Saddam Hussein and have since fought against the dissolution of central authority, "may come to see the formation" of their own separate region as necessary for their self-protection. Then, he writes, the U.S. could withdraw, provided the Sunnis guarantee that they won't give free run to al-Qaida.

Wishful thinking

There is more wishful thinking in Galbraith's scenario. He sees signs that Turkey, which has long opposed a Kurdish state, will accept an Iraqi Kurdistan as a buffer to an Islamic Arab state to the south. He suggests that a theocratic Shiite state in the south could become a U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida and other Sunni fundamentalists.

There are, however, problems for which Galbraith provides no solution, such as the mushrooming civil war in Baghdad. He is certain only that a continuing U.S. presence is making a messy situation worse.

"By invading Iraq and mismanaging the aftermath, the United States precipitated Iraq's collapse as a unified state, but did not cause it," he says. The de facto partition in much of the country now in place should be accepted. "In Baghdad and other mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, the United States cannot contribute to the solution, because there is no solution, at least in the foreseeable future."

Which is where the wishful thinking ends.

The Demand for Mobile E-Mail Service Continues to Grow

Tricia Duryee of the Seattle Times reports on one of the most obvious techno-trends in recent times ...

Company executives popularized checking e-mail on the go through the BlackBerry.

Now, checking e-mail in the palm of your hand is something not only the suits want, it's increasingly in demand by ordinary consumers who want to stay in touch.

But the hang-ups are many.

Although the technology has been available for some time, it's complex and difficult to use. And other aspects of the service are also convoluted for consumers: They must consider new rate plans, which e-mail accounts they want to access, and which carrier and phone work best for them.

For now, the challenges probably will become more complicated as new applications are developed. And though carriers want to encourage consumers to use their new high-speed-data networks, it seems that they are content pushing more profitable products, such as ringtones and games rather than practical applications, such as e-mail.

It's clear consumers are interested in mobile e-mail. In multiple studies, it's the top item consumers say they want on their phone.

In a survey by the Yankee Group, it was the No. 1 feature for which subscribers 24 and older were willing to pay. In another survey, by Siemens, 69 percent said they were interested in their phone managing both office and private e-mails, calendars and contact lists.

"The wireless e-mail in the corporate market is something where we've had explosive growth over the last couple of years," said Mike Woodward, executive director, mobile professional solutions, for Cingular Wireless in Redmond.

"As that has matured, a much bigger opportunity has emerged with the ... consumer, who wants work but also personal e-mail."

Take Marc Steingrebe, 34, who works at a financial brokerage in Bellevue.

E-mail on his mobile phone was a necessity for Steingrebe since his employer blocks personal e-mail at work. About a year ago, after some research, he purchased a phone that allowed him to read his Hotmail and his Internet service provider accounts.

"My wife and I communicate a lot this way," he said. "We car pool, so a lot of times, if she's running late, she'll send e-mail, and I'll be able to see it on my phone," he said.

Although interest is high, adoption is low.

Seattle-based M:Metrics found only 7.3 percent of U.S. subscribers had used their phone to check personal e-mail in the three months ended in May.

"The consumer probably knows there's mobile e-mail, but I think people associate mobile e-mail with the enterprise, the businessmen with their BlackBerries," said David Yeh, a Yankee Group wireless and media-research associate.

Readily available

The technology exists even on low-end phones that are free. Many can connect to the Internet and pull down data that is readily available from a Web site, like Yahoo!, America Online, Google or MSN.

But the experience is often clunky -- it can require so many clicks a consumer isn't likely to use it.

Consumers should ask themselves a number of questions before deciding on what phone and service they want, said Cristy Swink, Cingular's executive director of messaging.

What kind of e-mail do you want to access -- for work, or personal, or both? How often do you think you will want to access it? And how much are you willing to spend?

First, consumers must sign up for a data account. With only a voice plan, they could end up spending a lot of money in additional fees for accessing the Internet.

The four major U.S. carriers commonly offer unlimited data for as little as $20 a month on top of a voice plan.

Basic questions

Once the basic questions are answered, the consumer still has to figure out how to use the phone. While executives have the help of an IT staff, consumers are left on their own.

"It's not completely intuitive," Steingrebe said. "I'm so used to doing it on computers, I found it not too hard to do on my own, but if I wasn't very tech-savvy, ... I might have a little trouble."

In reality, Steingrebe is having more than a little trouble. Several times a day the application kicks him out, and he has to log in again.

In addition, for the past two weeks, it hasn't worked at all. He's tried resetting his phone and other quick fixes, but they haven't fixed it. It's something he'd rather not call customer support about.

In an attempt to make things easier, the carriers use applications from a third-party to provide e-mail. Several carriers in the U.S., including Cingular, Sprint, Boost and Virgin Mobile, rely on an application by OZ Communications, a Montreal-based company.

The free application, once installed, is easy to use. For instance, a text message will be sent when you get a new e-mail. Also, it displays the name of the person sending the e-mail and the subject line. If it is spam, or unfamiliar, the user doesn't have to download the entire item and pay for the extra data.

"Making it on the phone exactly how it looks on the PC" means there's no confusion, said Beverly Wilks, marketing manager at OZ.

Still, there are shortcomings. The application does not allow attachments to be sent, and it only includes access to Yahoo!, AOL and MSN's Hotmail. OZ does not include Google-owned Gmail. Access to Internet service providers, such as Comcast or Earthlink, are an additional hurdle.

This is where the real conflicts begin, said Yeh, of the Yankee Group. The carriers are being protective of their networks, and the portals can't agree to work together.

Attachments aren't allowed, he said, because "the carriers don't want to be seen as a pipe, and they won't say it, but they are interested in having a revenue share for everything that goes through their network. They want to control all the experiences."

Gmail is not included because all the Web portals can't agree to collaborate.

In fact, most of them are working on their own wireless initiatives. That could mean that if a consumer had accounts to more than one Web portal, multiple applications could be needed.

It gets more confusing.

OZ provides the application for the consumer market, but if someone buys a high-end phone such as a Palm Treo or a Windows Mobile device, the e-mail options differ.

Different options

Cingular's network, for instance, provides something called Xpress Mail, developed by Seven of Redwood City, Calif. Other applications are provided by Visto, and Steingrebe, who has a Windows Mobile device, has opted to use Pocket MSN, a Microsoft application.

The situation will probably get worse before it gets better. To illustrate the market, Yankee Group's Yeh has made a 4-by-4 grid showing all the offerings, markets, characteristics and pricing structures of the products.

The bottom line is that mobile e-mail is available to whoever wants it, but not without some persistence.

"We know that they [consumers] want these things, and they are trying to figure out how to do these things, but in a reasonable fashion, in which they don't want to pay like crazy," Yeh said.

The World's Most 'Hip' Hotels

Someone at the Associated Press has worked overtime in search of trendy sleeps ...

Luxury tent accommodations in Sri Lanka and South Africa made it onto Travel + Leisure magazine's "It List" of coolest hotels around the world.

The "It List," which appears in the June 2006 issue, features 15 hip and high-end hotels that are new or newly renovated, including several opening later this year.

No. 1 on the "It List" is the Four Seasons Tented Camp, Chiang Rai, Thailand, which offers tents with teakwood floors, a spa, and six resident elephants for riding.

Next is The James in Chicago, notable for amenities and minimalist design; The Marataba, in Marakele National Park, Limpopo, South Africa, where guests embark on safaris from their tented suites; the elegant Palacio Duhau-Park Hyatt Buenos Aires, in Argentina; and the villas at Bulgari Bali, in Indonesia, which is the Italian designer Bulgari's first resort.

Sixth and seventh on the list are two newly renovated New York properties: the Gramercy Park Hotel, a storied institution now owned by Ian Schrager, reopening in July, with artist Julian Schnabel designing the interior; and The London, formerly the Rihga Royal, reopening in September on West 54th Street.

European hotels fill the next three spots. The Chateau du Champ de Bataille, Le Neubourg, France, a 17th-century castle designed by the architect of Versailles, will be reincarnated in September as a glamorous palace hotel complete with gardens and open-air operas. Next are Boccadileone Suites, Rome, run by the Ferragamo fashion clan, and Do & Co Hotel, Vienna, which has a Turkish-influenced interior design.

The final five were the Banyan Tree, a collection of villas with gardens and a view of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains in Lijiang, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, China; the W Maldives Fesdu Retreat & Spa on an island in the Maldives; the JIA, a boutique hotel in Shanghai; The Fortress, a sprawling resort in a 2,000-year-old port in Galle, Sri Lanka, 70 miles from Colombo; and the extravagant Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates, Dubai.

For more details, go to www.travelandleisure.com.

The Genius Britain Betrayed

Ben MacIntyre of London's Sunday Times notes that France has apologized for Dreyfus, and now the British must make amends for Alan Turing, the father of the computer, who became their national scapegoat ...

The scapegoat of the Old Testament was a blameless goat sent into the wilderness to perish, symbolically bearing the sins of Israelites in a ritual form of guilt-purging: the “scape” in scapegoat derives from “escape”. Sometimes, we must assume, the poor creature did escape the fate intended for it, and found its way back to the herd. The rehabilitation of the innocent is one of the most profound acts any society can undertake, since it means acceptance of guilt, not avoidance of blame.

In mid-July, Jacques Chirac declared that Alfred Dreyfus, France’s most notorious victim of miscarried justice, was entirely innocent, 100 years to the day after he was finally acquitted of treason. In 1894 Captain Dreyfus, a young officer in the French Army, was accused of spying for Germany. He was stripped of his rank, subjected to intense psychological pressure in a failed attempt to extract a confession, found guilty anyway and sent to Devil’s Island off French Guiana, where he was afflicted by malaria, depression and dysentery. The only crime Dreyfus had committed was to be Jewish, when anti-Semitism and spy-fever had combined in a toxic brew; he was convicted on the ground of pure prejudice, backed up by the law.

Dreyfus was defended, most famously, by the novelist Émile Zola, and eventually pardoned, but his guilt and innocence have been argued over by Right and Left ever since. The homage paid to Dreyfus marks, in President Chirac’s words, a victory against “the dark forces of intolerance and hatred.”

The same apology should now be extended, in Britain, for Alan Turing. At first sight, there might seem to be little in common between the French officer and the oddball Cambridge mathematician who helped to win the Second World War by breaking Nazi codes, and thus created a blueprint for the modern computer. But both were patriots and heroes, and both were victimised, amid fear of foreign espionage, because they were different: Dreyfus for being Jewish, and Turing because he was homosexual.

Turing was found dead in his bed, in 1954, at the age of 41, after taking a bite from an apple laced with cyanide. Two years before he had been convicted of gross indecency for a homosexual affair, and forced to undergo oestrogen hormone injections, a primitive attempt to “cure” his sexual inclinations that caused him to grow breasts. His arrest and conviction led, in the words of David Leavitt, his latest biographer, to “a slow, sad decent into grief and madness.”

It was a most peculiar suicide, but then Turing was a man of many oddities, and a singular genius: he could limn the beauty of numbers. He became at the age of 22 a mathematics lecturer at King’s College, where homosexuality was unremarkable before the war. His fellow fellows made up a ditty: “Turing/Must have been alluring/To get made a don/So early on.”

In 1939 Turing was recruited to Bletchley Park, the Government’s code-breaking centre, to devote his mathematical skills to cracking Nazi encryption. With perseverance, inspiration and help from brains scarcely less brilliant than his own, Turing invented an electro-mechanical logic machine that could eliminate billions of possible solutions and gradually home in on the code. By 1941 the Enigma code had been broken, and the U-boat threat blunted, thanks, in large part, to this strange, unkempt, gay man who held his trousers up with string. Some 6,000 people knew that Enigma had been broken, and not one of them let the story leak: it was the best-kept secret in history.

Turing’s machine was called the Bombe, in part because of the way it ticked as it “thought” its way towards a solution. Very few understood how it worked; and even fewer understood what made Turing tick. He was an obsessive runner; he chained his mug to a radiator at Bletchley Park, fearing theft; like some other great thinkers he was almost certainly an undiagnosed autistic.

In 1952, when reporting a burglary to the police, he naively admitted to a relationship with a rent boy. Instead of a prison sentence, the judge ordered psychoanalysis and a year’s chemical treatment for a condition then regarded with horror as a combination of illness, mental frailty and immorality. It is hard to see Turing as anything other than a victim of homophobia, but like Dreyfus he was also prey to the political paranoia of the times.

The scandal of Burgess and Maclean had firmly equated homosexual “vice” with treachery. In the Cold War miasma of suspicion and intolerance, Turing’s homosexuality and his knowledge of British intelligence secrets made him a security risk: perhaps, to quote the title of Leavitt’s book, he “knew too much.”

Turing’s was a discreet martyrdom. The great and good did not come forward, as they had for Dreyfus, to defend a man being persecuted not for anything he had done, but for what he was. Turing’s wartime role was still unknown, for the truth about Bletchley Park and the Enigma code would not be revealed until the 1970s. His full contribution to computer science has become apparent only in the past two decades: every keyboard stroke you make, every tiny digital calculation of your PC, can be traced back to Turing’s machine. Yet even today he is less celebrated than he deserves, in part because of his sexuality, his conviction, his appalling treatment and his tragic end.

This week the French President praised Dreyfus as a great patriot, but in truth he was a brave and ordinary man wrenched from obscurity by bigotry. There was nothing ordinary about Turing, and his contribution to history was immeasurably greater. He was treated with a cruelty that today seems utterly abhorrent. A public acknowledgement of that would be a noble and timely gesture: then we could escape from the debate over his sexuality and get on with celebrating his extraordinary mind. Turing was not Dreyfus; all the same, j’accuse.

Euro-Mobiles May Finally Receive Roaming Relief

It's about time ...

David Rennie of London's Daily Telegraph reports from Brussels that momentum is growing to force mobile phone service providers to bring their exorbitant roaming fees into line:

The European Commission unveiled plans yesterday to slash the "exorbitant" cost of using mobile phones abroad by up to 70 per cent. The announcement set the stage for a battle with the mobile phone industry.

Telephone operators across Europe currently levied "roaming" charges that were up to five times the true cost of connecting customers when they travelled outside their home countries, said José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president.

Telephone firms would have six months to cut their prices voluntarily before the commission used its powers to impose price caps, he said in Brussels. "There is still a chance for them to show that they are serious about self-regulation."

At present, British travellers using UK mobiles abroad face huge variations in prices. A four-minute call home on a UK phone used in France typically costs £2.38. The same call from Malta costs £4.83, according to commission statistics. Making local calls while overseas can cost up to 18 times as much as making a local call while at home.

Even receiving calls from home can prove expensive. The average British mobile phone user currently pays a charge of 43p a minute to receive calls while overseas.

The commission is now threatening to impose mandatory ceilings on roaming charges. The price caps are designed to reduce operators' profit margins on calls placed overseas to 30 per cent - a move that the commission said would save European consumers £3.7 billion a year.

The proposal is the latest in a series of consumer-friendly initiatives designed to persuade sceptical European voters that the European Union project can "add value" to their lives.

Mr Barroso said the plan was part of a grander scheme to show citizens a "Europe of results", driven by the interests of ordinary people. "For this commission, the single market is first and foremost for consumers, like you and me," he said.

The plan must first win approval from EU national governments and the European Parliament. That process is likely to take two or three years, though the commission said it hoped to push the plans through in time for the 2007 summer holiday season.

Viviane Reding, the EU telecoms commissioner, said: "Consumers should be aware that roaming will remain an expensive experience when they are going on holiday this summer." For too long, unwary tourists had risked paying as much for their phone calls abroad as they did for their holidays, she added.

If the new proposals are applied, the maximum price for calling home from abroad would fall to about 35p a minute, and the retail cost of receiving a mobile phone call when travelling elsewhere in the EU would be capped at about 11.5p a minute.

Britain, France and Germany all have large mobile phone industries, and can be expected to amend the commission proposal. Operators have predicted that costs may simply be passed on to domestic customers. But Mrs Reding said competition in most national markets was too fierce for mobile phone firms to risk raising their rates.

In a foretaste of political battles to come, the plan unveiled yesterday had been watered down within the European Commission after strong opposition from commissioners including Peter Mandelson, who called a first draft heavy-handed. A first plan called for eliminating overseas charges, and imposing a single charging scheme across the EU.

Industry lobbying is still expected to be fierce. Operators currently earn six per cent of their revenues from roaming charges, which are worth nearly £6 billion a year.

Affordable Wi-Fi Experiment Launched in the USA

Mike Hughlett of the Chicago Tribune reports on an attempt to make a logistical breakthrough which will have a major impact on access to cyberspace ...

CHASKA, Minn. -- Nestled in the bucolic Minnesota River valley, this town is ground zero for a great Internet experiment. And Ben Palmby is a prime test subject.

Palmby signed up for his hometown's high-speed wireless Web service when it was launched two years ago. It was cheap: less than half the cost of high-speed Internet through cable TV or a phone line. But then, the quality of Chaska's service sometimes seemed only half as good. "For the price, you get your money's worth," Palmby said.

Chaska is one of the first U.S. cities to offer almost all of its residents Wi-Fi. Users plug a city-supplied Wi-Fi receiver into their computers, allowing them to receive Web service through radio signals, thus untethering their machines from telephone cables and making them theoretically mobile.

Wi-Fi systems have been rolled out in close to 60 U.S. cities and counties, according to muniwireless.com, and are being planned in more than 120 more.

Many of those cities are going Wi-Fi for the same reason as Chaska, and they can all learn some lessons from this town of 17,449 at the 2000 census.

Chaska, just like big-city brethren Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco, pitched Wi-Fi as a way to bring high-speed wireless to citizens who otherwise might not be able to afford it -- or might not want to afford it at around $40 per month.

Chaska's wireless effort has been a success, said Esme Vos, who runs muniwireless.com, a Web site that tracks municipal Wi-Fi. "It's considered a very good network."

But Chaska's network has had its share of woes -- slow speeds, dead connections -- sparking customer angst along the way.

"It took about a year and a half before we felt we really had a good handle on the network," said Bradley Mayer, Chaska's former tech manager whose success there helped land him a job at EarthLink, the Atlanta-based Internet service provider, which also builds Wi-Fi networks.

There's an art to setting up a wireless system, ensuring that radio signals do what they're supposed to do and provide quality Web service.

In Chaska, "There was a lot of pre-conceived notions that you could just blast [Wi-Fi signals] through walls and trees and everything," Mayer said.

Instead, Mayer made some unpleasant discoveries. Wet, leafy trees, for one thing, absorb radio signals, hampering Wi-Fi coverage. And this: Wi-Fi signals don't pass through stucco as they do wooden walls, another negative for coverage. Chaska had to devise ways to remedy problems like that. "You can't change the laws of physics, but you can bend them," Mayer said.

Bigger cities, bigger challenges

Bigger cities will face bigger challenges than Chaska, if only because of their size.

"It's an order of magnitude more complex," said Ellen Kirk, marketing vice president at Tropos Networks, a leading Wi-Fi equipment maker. Tropos built Chaska's system.

"It's much easier to implement Wi-Fi technology in a smaller site," said Roberta Wiggins, a wireless analyst at Yankee Group, a tech research firm. "It hasn't yet been proven in a really large area."

Chaska, 27 miles southwest of Minneapolis, covers about 15 square miles. The city was founded about 150 years ago and still sports many handsome, old buildings fashioned from the cream-colored brick for which the area is known.

Wealthy suburbs have grown up around Chaska. But Chaska itself has an income profile more in tune with the Twin Cities norm: It's home to both trailer parks and ritzy homes abutting Hazeltine National Golf Course, one of the nation's finer golf links.

The idea for a more affordable broadband alternative -- one priced less than $20 per month -- started with Mayer. He pitched it to Chaska City Manager Dave Pokorney, who liked it and brought it to the City Council.

From the outset, Chaska had some advantages to become a Wi-Fi pioneer, including an advanced telecommunications system and a municipal electric utility.

City-owned light poles

Chaska also owns its own light poles, the roosts for radio transceivers in a Wi-Fi system, so it didn't need to negotiate arrangements to mount the radios.

Wi-Fi systems are made up of a "mesh" of transceivers that bounce signals back and forth from each other. Chaska has 365 of them, covering about 95 percent of the city's households.

Chaska launched the system, dubbed Chaska.net, in June 2004. It offered a four-month free trial to about 1,000 of the city's 8,000 households.

After the trial, the service would cost $16 per month. (Currently it is $17, while high-speed Internet through local phone and cable companies is $25 to $45 per month).

The idea was to essentially use the free trial as a test period to see how Chaska.net worked. "In hindsight, that was a mistake," Pokorney said.

That's because 1,000 households made for too big of a test sample, considering the new network still had bugs. A lot of Chaskans peppered the city with complaints. A smaller sample would have been easier.

"The speed wasn't good, or they couldn't get on [the network]," Pokorney said. "Sometimes customer service was a problem. It was hard for us to staff up to meet peak times."

Indeed, Ben Palmby ended up driving to City Hall to solve a service problem.

"No one ever answered the phone," said Palmby, who has subscribed to Chaska's Web service since its inception. "Their customer service was horrible."

Inconsistent service

Palmby, a chemical-dependency technician, said that at first, Chaska.net was pretty reliable. There were some problems: A lot of his e-mail ended up being read as spam and deleted before he could read it.

But "it was way better than AOL," he said referring to his old dial-up Internet service.

Then, after about six months, Palmby's Chaska.net service began slowing down -- pages would take 20 minutes to load -- and sometimes didn't work at all. The problem, he discovered, lay in the city's attempts to improve its overall Wi-Fi coverage by moving some radio transceivers.

The quality of Wi-Fi coverage depends on how many radio transceivers a system has, where those radios are placed, and how many of them are hooked directly to the Internet.

For instance, transceivers tied to fiber-optic lines -- gateways to the Internet -- provide stronger coverage, but effectively cost more.

Chaska found that it needed to add more gateway receivers to improve coverage, as well as reconfigure some radios.

The improvements cost $300,000 beyond the original $600,000 that Chaska sunk into the system.

This spring, the city shelled out more money for a whole new generation of Tropos-made radios. And it contracted out customer service and network administration to tech giant Siemens.

Network quality and customer satisfaction seems to have improved. Last year, while 1,100 Chaska residents signed onto the service, 800 quit, leaving a net gain of only 300.

This year, "we have seen a significant decrease in the number of people canceling," Pokorney said. The service now has 2,300 subscribers; 300 more than the 2,000 customers it needs to break even.

Palmby said his Wi-Fi service again became reliable -- until he moved a month ago to another part of Chaska. His new home is in an area where Wi-Fi coverage is weak.

So, for high-speed Internet on his home computer, he switched to Time Warner Cable's service. It costs $45 and is faster than Chaska.net, Palmby said.

But he's kept Chaska.net. He thinks the "connected community" ideal it represents is a great idea. And he can use it on his laptop throughout much of the town. "It's really convenient," Palmby said.

Not a cyber village

Despite the mobility advantages of wireless Web service, Chaska hasn't morphed into some sort of cyber village.

Downtown at the Embers, a family-style restaurant, waitress Amanda Burford said she occasionally sees customers with their laptops flipped open. But they're usually working on spreadsheets or other programs.

"I hardly ever see anyone on the Internet," she said.

Across the street from the Embers, Chaska sports a classic town square park complete with a gazebo. Has Burford ever spotted anyone there with an open laptop on a sunny spring day? Not once.

"People use the system to get inexpensive high-speed Internet into their house," said City Manager Pokorney.

That's pretty much the same -- at least now -- in other Wi-Fi cities. But Chaska is increasingly unique in one respect: owning and operating its own system.

Quincy Becomes a Power Base

Blaine Harden of the Washington Post has found that power has more than one meaning in the open spaces of central Washington in the Pacific Northwest ...

QUINCY, Grant County -- Microsoft is pouring concrete in a bean field on the west end of town. Yahoo! is digging up a field of alfalfa out on the east end. Google, which declines to comment, is said to be sniffing around for its own field of dreams here in the semidesert outback of Washington's interior.

This small farm town, population 5,300, has become the Klondike of the wildly competitive Internet era. The gold in Quincy is electricity, which technology heavyweights need to operate ever-larger data centers as they fight for world domination.

Their data centers -- air-conditioned warehouses filled with thousands upon thousands of computer servers that talk to Internet users around the globe -- are extraordinary power hogs. Microsoft says electricity consumption at its data centers doubled over the past four years and will triple over the next five.

There is cheap electricity here, and lots of it. That is because the Columbia, the premier hydroelectric river in North America, flows nearby. Three publicly owned local utilities own five large dams on the river, and they produce much more electricity than the sparse local population can use. With power prices soaring, the three utilities have become the hydroelectric emirates of the Pacific Northwest.

Until now, they have been obligated under 50-year-old contracts to sell about two-thirds of their power -- without profit -- to major utilities serving millions of people in Seattle, Tacoma and Portland. The arrangement helped keep monthly electric bills in the Northwest far below the national average.

Those old contracts, though, are expiring -- a development that will help push up residential electricity rates across the region. And the mid-Columbia utilities are scurrying to sell their newly unleashed power to the corporate giants of the Internet -- if they are willing to plant "server farms" in two-stoplight towns such as Quincy.

They do seem uncommonly eager.

"Salivating" for power

Out in the bean field, Microsoft is rushing to complete what it says will be the largest data center it has ever built. It is scheduled to go online in February.

Downstream in The Dalles, Ore., Google is building a data center that will go online within the next year and is reported by local officials to be scouring the region looking for other sites.

Upstream in Wenatchee, Yahoo! is expected to go online with another data center in the fall and is in negotiations for still others.

"They are salivating," said Rufus Woods, publisher of The Wenatchee World.

It was his grandfather, also named Rufus Woods, who was the principal booster and relentless propagandist behind federal construction of Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1942 as the world's largest dam. It is still the largest hydroelectric plant in North America.

Grand Coulee, by creating a 151-mile-long reservoir behind the dam, ironed out the violent flow of the Columbia, ending early summer floods and making it easier for local utilities downstream to build much less expensive dams that could milk significant amounts of power from the river.

The first Rufus Woods boasted noisily in the pages of his newspaper that electricity from the dams would lure major industry to Wenatchee and the Columbia Basin. But the federal government broke his heart by stringing wires across the Northwest and setting up rules requiring dams to sell most electricity at a postage-stamp rate, meaning that power had to cost the same in Wenatchee as it did hundreds of miles away in Seattle, Tacoma or Portland.

How many jobs?

Although farming in the Columbia Basin boomed thanks to irrigation water diverted by Grand Coulee, major industry, for the most part, ignored Wenatchee and towns such as Quincy for most of the past seven decades.

Companies could get plenty of cheap power in Seattle and Portland without having to build in the boondocks -- until now.

"Everything is finally coming together for us," said Curt Morris, a commissioner of the Port of Quincy. "By taking that calculated risk to build those dams years ago, we have an asset that is going to start performing for us."

He said that data-center investment by Microsoft and Yahoo! would more than double the $300 million tax base in Quincy. The price of vacant lots in Quincy has jumped fourfold since word of Yahoo! and Microsoft leaked early this year.

At The Wenatchee World, though, there are doubts about how many jobs will come with the server farms that are going to suck up the region's electricity. Yahoo! has told planners it will have between eight and 25 employees in Wenatchee, while Microsoft and Yahoo together have said they will employ about 150 in Quincy.

"The numbers of employees are so small," said Wilfred Woods, 86, chairman of the board at the newspaper and son of the late Rufus Woods. "We are not backing the coming of the data centers like we backed Grand Coulee."

The Woodses -- Wilfred and his son Rufus, the current publisher -- say they are worried about the prudence and competence of the mid-Columbia utilities to manage the sale of power to the Internet behemoths in a way that maximizes local economic development and minimizes incompetence and waste.

Concerns arise

The recent management history at Chelan County Public Utility District, which serves Wenatchee, and Grant County Public Utility District, which services Quincy, is checkered.

When power prices soared during the Western energy crisis of 2001, Chelan PUD paid two of its power traders $285,000 each. Salaries for several managers at the utility also rose to $100,000-plus levels, causing widespread irritation in a county where the median family income is $38,000 a year. Top managers have since been replaced.

"They have money coming out their ears," Rufus Woods said. "There has been an attempt to take that money and put it into the hands of the people who work there."

Grant County PUD, too, has weathered management scandals and been forced to replace top managers. It is now being challenged by the Internal Revenue Service for issuing tax-free bonds to build a fiber-optic network that could benefit private business. The fiber-optic network has been a major selling point for Microsoft and Yahoo!, whose server farms need redundant, high-speed data pipelines.

Managers at the two utilities say they, too, are worried about how much cheap power should be allocated to companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo! -- and how many jobs are likely to come of it.

"It is a real concern of the commissioners," said Tim Culbertson, general manager at Grant County PUD, referring to the five elected local officials who make policy for the utility. "They don't necessarily like the low-jobs and high-megawatts situation that goes with the data centers. But the utility has an obligation to serve. It has no ability to require jobs."

Costly to replace

For millions of electricity consumers in the Northwest, the unfolding power machinations in the mid-Columbia region are likely to cause increases in monthly electricity bills. As high-tech companies use more low-cost electricity in places such as Quincy, less will find its way to homes around the region.

"When I have to replace it in the marketplace, that power will be more costly," said Eric Markell, senior vice president for energy resources at Puget Sound Energy, the largest utility in Washington.

Markell said that while there are many other forces putting upward pressure on power costs, the loss of cheap power from the mid-Columbia dams "will be a factor in rising electricity bills."

Here in Quincy, local business leaders are relieved that the Yahoo! and Microsoft data centers will create relatively few jobs and that the children of newcomers will not swamp local schools.

"For us, having minimal new jobs is a relief, at least for the short term," said Lisa Karstetter, executive director of the Quincy Valley Chamber of Commerce. "We can't grow that fast. Everything is already full around here."

Worm Pretends It's a Windows Program

A newly discovered worm, pretending to be Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage program, is being used by hackers to install malicious software on personal computers.

The worm, a program that spreads itself throughout an infected PC, is being sent via Time Warner's AOL Instant Messenger software, said Ronald O'Brien, senior analyst at Abingdon, U.K.-based Sophos. Closely held Sophos first warned about it on 3 July.

Once installed on a PC, the worm copies itself into a Windows system folder, creates a new file displayed as "Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Notification" and becomes part of the computer's automatic startup, O'Brien said.

Kjersti Gunderson, with Microsoft, said the next version of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool, to be released Tuesday, will scan for and clean the so-called Backdoor: Win32/IRCbot.R worm.

Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage software checks to see that users have licensed copies of Windows before allowing them to download important updates onto their PCs.

Affirmations in Cyberspace

Benjamin Romano of the Seattle Times has found a website that helps people keep their positive focus ...

What: Joe's Goals

What it does: Lets you track goals to be accomplished and vices to be avoided, and share whether you're meeting the commitments. Meeting a positive goal, such as exercising, adds a point, while smoking or other self-selected negatives take a point away. Of course, it's all based on your own reporting.

Who's Joe? Ian Smith, a 24-year-old Montana transplant who works as a senior Web developer at WorldClass Strategy, is the man behind the self-funded project. "I wanted something that was really simple and really light ... and I wanted it online so that I could use it both at home and at work," he says.

Ian's goals: Work on Joe's Goals -- he tries to spend one to three hours a day, plus more on the weekend; exercise; drink more water; plan honeymoon (he's getting married in August); dine out less.

Other people's goals: Since launching June 10, the site has 3,100 users who had about 13,000 goals as of last week. The top five are related to exercise. Other common goals include update blog, meditate, take vitamins/prescription drugs, practice a musical instrument and spend more time with family and friends. Some vices: buy coffee, eat dessert, wake up late, play video games for more than an hour.

Sharing: Because the site allows you to share progress on goals, Smith says people use it to help reach substance-abuse-related goals, such as quitting smoking. "They then share [their progress] with an accountability partner."

Making money: It's not his first priority. The service is free and generates revenue through Google-served advertising. "Initially, it's just tinkering around," he says.

Competitors: Other online task managers include Ta-da Lists from 37signals and Remember The Milk. Smith said those don't do the consistent day-to-day tracking as well as his does. One desktop-based competitor, Sciral Consistency, is more of a goal-tracker.

Adding features: Smith is steadily building the site, but wants to keep it simple. "I'm trying to really balance making it complex enough for power users, but keeping it so simple that my Mom can just sign up and start using it."

KVM Switch Bridges the New with the Old

Craig Crossman of the McClatchy News-Tribune syndicate has found a welcome innovation for those who have multiple computers due to various upgrades and purchases over time ...

There are countless reasons we sometimes wind up with two of something in the home. However when it comes to computers, it's usually because household members want their own computers or the original one is getting really old.

If it's the first scenario, welcome to a lot more peace and quiet in the home. Now let's look at the latter scenario and decide what to do with the older model.

If you try to sell it, you won't get much. Some will offer it as a hand-me-down to the kids to justify getting the new one, but that usually doesn't work since it's the newer one that's going to have the technology to play the games kids like.

However, there's another way to go. To make it happen, you'll need something called a KVM switch.

With the switch, you will be able to control both computers using only one keyboard, video screen and a mouse, which is where the KVM gets its name.

This setup allows you to keep a lot of your work on the older computer while using the newer model for more contemporary applications.

Or you might want to consider moving to a different platform. If your older computer is a Windows machine, you can add on one of Apple's Mac Mini models that require you bring your own keyboard screen and mouse anyway.

The clever Flip

KVM switches are not created equal. And while most of them look like a boring little box with buttons and lights, there's Flip. At first glance, the Flip, from Belkin, looks pretty much like a fancy Y-adapter cable. But it's actually a very clever and unique design.

Belkin offers three different models. There's the Flip with PS/2 connector ($49.99), the Flip with PS/2 and audio ($59.99), and the Flip with USB and audio ($59.99). Plus there's a really cool wireless version due to be released shortly, the Flip wireless with USB and audio ($79.99).

Only the USB and wireless versions can switch between a PC and a Mac.

The audio models let you also use one pair of speakers to monitor both computers. But the Flip also has the ability to "lock" the sound coming from any computer no matter which one you happen to be monitoring. This is ideal, for example, if you are listening to something on iTunes. By locking the sound on the iTunes computer, your music won't be interrupted when you switch to the other one.

Connecting the Flip to each computer is pretty straightforward. You just connect the appropriate cables into the back of each computer and plug your keyboard, screen and mouse into the Y portion of the Flip.

To switch between the computers is a breeze. The Flip sports a little disk-shaped remote control. Just press your finger on the indented top of the disk. Do it again and the other computer becomes active.

When you power the computers on, a little dual-colored LED in the remote lights up. As you toggle back and forth, the LED changes to either a green or yellow color that corresponds to the color-coded Y-cable.

Finally the wireless model introduces a cordless remote disk. The only thing is that the LED doesn't change colors when you switch. Still for me, the fewer wires the better. So before you unload that other computer, think about using a KVM switch. It's a great way to add something new without burning a bridge.