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But Pausch, whose oldest child is only 6-years-old now, clearly had strong incentives to endure recovery from the painful surgery to remove tumors from the pancreas and grueling months of chemotherapy.

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who inspired millions through his “last lecture”, died at his home in Virginia on Friday of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

Pausch’s family has requested that donations on his behalf be made to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, CA 90245, or to Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.

He clicked through photos of himself as a boy, one of which showed him at the beach in my hometown of Rehoboth Beach, Del. in 1965. He also shared pictures of his own PET scans depicting several large tumors devouring his organs. And there were pictures of past students, co-workers, and bosses who played major roles in his life.

Pausch went on to become an award-winning professor and helped pioneer virtual reality research. He was a key member of Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center, a master’s degree program that brings artists and engineers together. He also helped create Alice, an interactive program that helps teach young people computer programming.

I can attest to the fact that it sucks to lose a parent at any age. But I was 29-years-old when my mother died. I have many wonderful memories of her that I replay in my mind almost daily. Unfortunately, Pausch’s children will most likely not have any memories of their own of their dad. And that is tragic. While there could never be any replacement for the time they have lost with him, I hope the enduring legacy of his lecture and the book that followed will provide some comfort to his children as they grow up.

Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006. And his popular “last lecture” at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 became an Internet sensation, viewed by millions throughout the world. The lecture was part of an ongoing series at many universities that asked professors to think deeply about important life lessons.

(Credit:
Randy Pausch)

I am glad for Pausch and his family that they were given as much time as possible. But I am still saddened at the loss of such an incredible and inspiring man. And I am saddened even more that his children will grow up without him in their lives.

Pausch is survived by his wife, Jai, and three young children: Chloe, Dylan and Logan.

(Credit:
Randy Pausch)

Throughout the talk he shared insights about the power of helping others and always going after your dreams even when you’re faced with obstacles. A graduate of Brown University and Carnegie Mellon’s computer science Ph.D. program, he confessed that he had not originally been admitted to either school. But unwilling to accept these roadblocks, he managed to get in anyway.

Pausch playing with his three young children.

I first heard about Randy Pausch last year when my older sister forwarded me The Wall Street Journal column written by Zaslow, who had attended Pausch’s last lecture. We had lost our mother to pancreatic cancer almost exactly five years earlier, so Pausch’s story hit particularly close to home for me and my sisters. As I read about Pausch’s lecture, my heart immediately went out to him and his young family as I envisioned the struggle they faced.

Unlike my mother’s battle with pancreatic cancer, Pausch’s journey lasted nearly two years. This is incredible given the fact that only 20 percent of all people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer make it through the first year, according to the American Cancer Society. And only about 4 percent live five years post-diagnosis. My mother, who was diagnosed a week before my younger sister’s college graduation in May 2002, died about three and a half months after her diagnosis.

With the help of Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Zaslow, Pausch turned his words of wisdom into a best-selling book, which was published this spring.

While no one would ever doubt my mother’s own passion for life, she was definitely in a different phase of her life than Randy Pausch. And thus, she decided to forgo palliative chemotherapy and let her illness take its natural course. She had beaten breast cancer nearly 15 years earlier at the age of 45 and was thankful to fulfill her greatest wish of seeing her youngest child graduate from college. (I joked with her when she was given her terminal diagnosis that she should have aimed for a higher goal, such as the marriage of her middle daughter. I’m 35 and still single.)

So what does this service cost?
The site charges a 5 percent to 12 percent service fee at checkout. While the mustachioed woman with the angry dog and one-legged lover from Tucson gets 100 percent of the figure she thought of when she registered her attic on the site.

I don’t exactly know how you notice that all the hotels in a city are full. Perhaps it’s the stream of well-dressed people wearing conference name tags stopping you in the street and asking if you would make them breakfast.

There is nothing like a good idea to get you out of bed in the morning. So here’s one I just stumbled across that will help you get into bed at night.
It’s called Airbedandbreakfast.com.

Anyway, Gebbia and Chesky, being in full command of their faculties, decided to offer their abode to a few of the conference attendees who had been insufficiently conscious to book a room. I apologize. I mean, of course, to attendees who were so into their designer selves that they had omitted to arrange for designer hotels.

But where can one buy faith in other human beings, enough faith that will get one through the first night?

The only other helpful hint appears to be: “2. Utilize onsite messaging. This feature allows you to contact the host before booking the room to ask questions, confirm availability, and educate yourself more about the listing.”

May I quote the site, while the Hitchcockian frissons subside a little on my six typing fingers?:

“You instantly meet new people instead of looking like a loner in the lobby bar. You’ll probably get full access to a kitchen so you can make ramen with boiling water (instead of warm tap water). You just may make a new friend, and overall, you’ll probably pay less.”

The idea, created by Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, is a delightfully San Francisco affair.
Apparently, Gebbia and Chesky noticed that there was a design conference in San Francisco and that all the hotels were full.

This is what I fear in the middle of the night.

I have very few friends, as perhaps you might imagine. Even fewer who would invite me to sleep at their homes. And the idea of having people you can stay with in different cities is extremely enticing, especially if the hosts follow the site’s recommendation and leave you O.J. and bagels in the fridge.

The last question in the guest section is: “My host was amazing! How can I leave feedback?” To which the answer is: “After your trip has concluded, you will be prompted by AB&B to leave guest/host feedback on each other’s profile pages.”

The only answers I can find on the site are under the “Tips” heading: “1. Use common sense. If a listing is missing data fields that are important to you (headshot, house images, or description) consider booking with other more complete listings, or message the host first to request they upload additional data.”

But, digipeople, I represent real people here. Data doesn’t solve everything. Really it doesn’t.

And so a business was born. As I understand it, you can offer your place up to strangers. Or you can go and sleep at strangers’ houses–presumably, with the strangers sleeping there too.

I would very much like to hear from any reader in possession of such heightened common sense that he or she has used this service. Successfully or otherwise.

Make ramen? Personally, I fear I would be making rather strange noises signifying an increased level of intestinal discomfort. Still, I did enjoy the idea that I would “probably” be paying less. Less than the Waldorf? Or less than Motel 6?

Yet I keep seeing cocktail sticks. And Wham CDs. Can anyone help me here?

(Credit: CC IndependentMan)

The site’s FAQ is so lovably extraordinary that I read it at least three times. There is a section for potential single-night landlords. And there is a section for guests.

I just went on the site again and there was a picture of a very welcoming female face offering a $90 room in Santa Monica. It is all so commercially tempting.

In AMD’s response filed this week the company says: “There is a fundamental distinction between exclusion of a rival through straight-forward underselling (price predation) and exclusion by means of a conditional discount that, on a unit-by-unit basis, is nominally less than the rival’s discount.”

As part of the ongoing legal process, AMD
filed a response
(to Intel’s Preliminary Pretrial Statement) on Thursday with the U.S. district court in Delaware concerning Intel’s alleged monopolistic practices.

Plaintiff’s Joint Response to Intel’s Preliminary Pretrial Statement

Intel continued. “AMD…has often floundered, introducing products that often failed to live up to expectations, even after embarrassing delays. And while AMD seeks to portray itself as the innovator in the microprocessor industry, its brief period of a computing performance advantage with the Opteron microprocessor cannot mask AMD’s historical and current position as a laggard in computing performance.”

“Moreover, the argument that Intel’s discounts are provided on an ‘all or nothing’ basis, or that OEMs are subject to punishment or retaliation, is wrong. All of the major OEMs doing business with Intel received significant discounts, whether or not they bought from AMD, and AMD does not contend otherwise.”

Intel’s statement that predates the AMD filing claimed that “AMD’s lawsuit is part of a larger strategy to secure greater success by deterring Intel from aggressive competition. Stripped of hyperbole, AMD’s complaint accuses Intel of competing too aggressively, by offering customers attractive, discounted prices and marketing and technical support to win their business.”

After a swath of redacted text, the allegation continues. “So, between 2000 and 2005…Intel conditioned its grant of discounts, rebates, special funds and other consideration on IBM’s explicit agreement to maintain its Intel exclusivity and to cancel or defer launches of AMD-based products.”

Allegations related to Sony and Toshiba are significant because Sony is still an exclusive user of Intel chips in its mainstream notebooks (as is Apple), while Toshiba broke a long stretch of exclusivity last year.

Advanced Micro Devices filed more legal papers this week alleging monopolistic practices by Intel. Some of AMD’s allegations involving PC makers are the most intriguing. Even when large blocks of text have been redacted. Moreover, the stridency of the language approaches that of the attacks from Nvidia’s CEO in previous weeks.

Intel’s Response to Plaintiff’s Joint Preliminary Case Statement

AMD also makes some more sweeping allegations, including: “What this case is…about is Intel’s conditional payments, conditional discounts, punishments, threats, coercion, and assorted technological chicanery that in combination closed AMD’s heightened window of opportunity and thereby prevented it from achieving sustainability as a long term innovation rival. Intel is in denial when it says nothing of the sort happened. The record even at this early and preliminary stage of discovery is replete with instances of just such misconduct.”

Intel Preliminary Pretrial Statement

AMD in June 2005 filed an antitrust complaint against Intel claiming that Intel illegally maintained a monopoly in the market for microprocessors.

And in an Intel response filed on Thursday, the company said: “Inconvenient facts–such as AMD’s ‘capture [of] nearly 60% of HP’s U.S. retail sales,’ according to AMD’s own complaint…are swept aside to preserve the dramatic effect.”

The document contains broad allegations as well was vendor-specific ones. Most of the particulars of allegations regarding “exclusive dealing” agreements are redacted (blackened out), but tantalizing prefaces to the redacted areas remain.

Intel also stated that “AMD’s case appears based on the logical fallacy that despite AMD’s strong success in the market segments in which its products offered advantages, it should have been even more successful, and thus Intel must have competed unfairly.”

There are also allegations related to IBM. “Intel denies that it ever ‘paid IBM’ to limit IBM’s marketing of Opteron-based systems or to ’shelve’ development of Opteron servers.”

(Credit:
AMD)

On the Google front, analyst George Askew and Reed Meyer of Stifel Nicolaus lowered their Google price target to $525 a share from $600 a share, as well as cut the earnings estimates for 2008 and 2009.

Google is scheduled to report its third quarter financial results on October 16, while SAP is scheduled to report its earnings on October 28.

The analysts cut Google’s earnings estimates to $19.37 a share from $20.20 a share for 2008, while also trimming back 2009 to $23.51 a share from $26.01 a share.

While the valuation is getting interesting, we still have several concerns. First, one industry source suggested to us that 4Q could see “a big drop” in orders compared to prior fourth quarters. We think it is important to get a read on how the 4Q business is building and how 2009 might look. Second, our due diligence suggests that 2Q and 3Q may have each included license revenue in the tens of millions from a deal with a major food company–possibly setting up a more difficult sequential comp in 4Q. Third, as we discussed last week, another industry source suggested that one of SAP’s customers may have stalled a deal as it saw its own customers beginning to delay payments. This behavior may well intensify in 4Q. Last, we note that it may be more difficult for SAP to reduce expenses than might be the case for Oracle given the high concentration of SAP employees in German and Europe.

Shares of SAP and Google continued their downward trek, as Wall Street weighed in Tuesday with earnings cuts.

Google’s shares dropped as low as 5.6 percent in intra-day trading to $350.26 a share, following a 2008 and 2009 estimated earnings cut and lowered price target offered by Stifel Nicolaus analysts. And SAP, which saw its shares pummeled Monday after issuing a warning its third quarter was not shaping up as anticipated, suffered a further decline as analysts cut their earnings estimates.

Walravens noted in his SAP research note:

We are reducing our financial projections for Google to reflect a more cautious global economic outlook. Our belief is based on 1) the apparent sharp slowdown in business activity late in 3Q08 for companies globally as the ongoing credit crisis depressed business and consumer confidence, and 2) the negative revenue impact of foreign currency moves relative to the stronger U.S. dollar. We conservatively project the economic slowdown to continue through 2009.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, ‘Tough times for tech’

Askew and Meyer noted in their research note:

The Magic also made a cameo in a Google demonstration of a high-powered, offline-capable version mobile Gmail.

Android shows in smartphones with a lot of computing muscle today, but Miner also promised that Android would move into more mainstream phones next year.

The Magic has a touch-screen keyboard, like the
Apple iPhone and unlike the Dream’s physical keyboard. Vodafone will offer the Android phone as the exclusive supplier in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, and France, and as a nonexclusive supplier in Italy.

Rich Miner, leader of the Android effort, wasn’t worried about the relative lack of Android phones.

The next tidbit came with Huawei Technologies’ mock-up of an iPhone-like Android model. Although that system wasn’t actually running any software, Edward Chen, leader of Huawei’s device business unit, said the company expected them to be on the market in the third quarter of 2009.

After that, though, it was slim pickings, though Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and Garmin all have committed to releasing Android devices this year. Samsung decided against showing off its Android phone. Meanwhile, Microsoft showed off its forthcoming Windows Mobile 6.5, due in the fourth quarter.

The GMSA Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona could have been a great place for Google to demonstrate progress establishing Android in the industry, but instead the open-source operating system showed only a slightly larger toehold.

“The vision long term is to take this down market, but this is the first version and we wanted it to be best-in-class and to come out with a bang. In terms of going down market, we’ll probably start to see lower-end smartphones and higher-end feature phones using it in 2010,” Miner said. “The key thing to remember is that this release is 1.0 of the software. We’re very happy with the first and second phones that have come out.”

The biggest Android news from the show was the debut of the HTC Magic. This new Android model is the second Android model from the Taiwanese company; the first, HTC’s Dream, is better known as the T-Mobile G1.

“We think we are very much on track. We only released the open-source code late last October,” Miner said in an interview. “We said we’d have the release software out in 2008 and we did. We said we’d have at least one phone out in 2008, and we launched that in October.”

CNET News staff writer Maggie Reardon contributed to this report.

Google has high hopes for Android, which the company launched in an effort to spur smartphone development, mobile use of the Web, and new search advertising. Although Android certainly isn’t vaporware, and Google’s clout makes the effort a serious challenge to other operating systems, so far Android’s potential exceeds its real-world presence.

HTC's Magic is the second Android-powered phone to hit the market.

(Credit:
HTC)

It’ll launch in full in the “next few months,” he said.

“I don’t know if I’d frame it as a concrete thing we haven’t chosen to do; I would maybe say that there’s a trend in terms of how things play out and we haven’t done it yet,” Zuckerberg said. “Openness is clearly a very good thing.”

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

“The audience is packed with people who build Web apps,” Carson said as he kicked off the talk. “What’s it like to grow your company and build a popular Web app?”

Zuckerberg, wearing sneakers and his trademark North Face fleece, said that it was his first trip to London since junior high and talked extensively about Facebook Connect, the data-portability technology that had just been demonstrated onstage by his colleague Dave Morin. “Facebook Connect is basically the next evolution of Facebook Platform, and the thing that I’m most excited about it is that it basically brings into parity what people can do on Facebook.com with the rest of the Web,” he said.

In terms of advice for developers, Zuckerberg declined to really elaborate on what he’d do differently if he were starting the company now, or what mistakes he’s acknowledged he’s made along the way. But he did say that he prides himself on having a workforce that’s largely staffed by people with technical and engineering backgrounds. “A lot of the people (at Facebook), even if they’re not in technical roles, they have technical backrounds,” Zuckerberg said. He added that the company’s chief financial officer is one of them. “I think credibility is external but DNA is internal. I don’t know that having a CFO that has a more technical background gives us more credibility, but I think it could help us make better decisions.”

He spoke much more concretely, probably because of the developer-heavy audience, about the “openness” issue. Standards like OpenSocial have been developed in the wake of Facebook’s generally closed-off policies with its code and platform, and so far, Facebook has declined to support these or other standards like OpenID. Zuckerberg still would not rule it out.

“With the new design we’re trying to do that with the profile,” Zuckerberg explained when talking about sharing. “When we launched (the) platform, a lot of apps just focused on getting a box to be installed on the user’s page. The issue with that is the app may never have been used by the user again,” he said. Facebook aims to “incentivize” apps that encourage real interaction.

Carson’s questions were, for the most part, not particularly challenging for the PR-groomed Zuckerberg. But he did prod the young founder into mentioning the longstanding rumors that Facebook wants to institute a payment system for its users and has been working on it for some time.

When talking about the central importance of sharing to Facebook, Zuckerberg described how members are now willing to share much more than they were when the site launched four years ago. He compared it to Moore’s Law, suggesting that the “exponential” rate of sharing could be charted and predicted when it came to future features that Facebook could add. One of those things could be location-awareness, which Carson asked about and which Zuckerberg implied in his Moore’s Law analogy that the alleged exponential curve simply hasn’t reached yet.

Zuckerberg (right) speaks with FOWA organizer Ryan Carson.

But the company is releasing Facebook Connect, which is now in beta, more cautiously than with its platform predecessor, which had a wildfire debut that left the company “floored, in a positive way,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re having a little bit of a different process in terms of rolling it out because it involves people taking their information offsite. We want to make sure that the privacy and everything else is in order.”

More than anything, he continually stressed, Facebook is about sharing information and content.

“There is the rumored Facebook payment system,” he added with a bit of cheek. “Who knows when it’ll be ready…(There’s) definitely nothing to announce yet.”

He also talked more candidly than usual about the shortcomings of the platform, and how it soon became a hub for goofy viral applications that users quickly started to find annoying. The redesigned look of Facebook pages relegates many of those apps to a separate “boxes” tab, which has irked many developers, but Zuckerberg implied that if apps are seeing a decline in use because of the redesign, they probably aren’t the sorts of apps that Facebook envisioned as part of its platform in the first place.

“Someone could build that, and there are definitely a lot of platform apps that have business models that are based on payments,” he said and then paused.

LONDON–These are tough times for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The economy is in the tank, Madison Avenue still doesn’t have full faith in the social network’s ability to generate ad revenue, and entertainment-industry analysts estimate that in a few years the 24-year-old CEO could be in danger of losing his title of “world’s youngest billionaire” to pop singer Miley Cyrus.

But Zuckerberg lucked out on Friday with his keynote “fireside chat” at the Future of Web Apps conference. Interviewed onstage by conference organizer Ryan Carson, Zuckerberg wasn’t subject to any particularly difficult questions (after all, he answered the “profitability” one this week), heckling from the audience a la South by Southwest, or otherwise awkward moments. The point of the talk, really, was just about what it means to be a developer.

But he had some critical words for Facebook’s open-source rivals. “For the developer platforms, in terms of the supposed ‘open’ stack and then the Facebook one, right now the feedback we get from developers is that people prefer a lot of our interfaces,” he said. Eventually, though, he said that Facebook would extend its APIs so that third parties could implement the massive amounts of data on the site in one form or another.

“There are millions of people who are using Facebook just on mobile devices, and location is a big part of that,” was as specific as he would get.

“I don’t go home that often,” Zuckerberg replied.

The goal should be “sustainability,” or the idea that individuals and organizations should be working on ways to make sure any environmentally friendly improvements or changes they make to their businesses should be sustainable over the long term, or they shouldn’t be done at all. But developing and implementing sustainable ideas is harder to accomplish in real life than it is to discuss in luxury resort hotels yards from the Pacific Ocean.

More and more companies are starting to realize that they can enjoy the PR benefits of turning “green,” by reducing their carbon footprint through energy savings or changes to their products. But every CEO always has another shade of green somewhere in the back of his or her mind. Companies need to reduce their impact on the environment, but that doesn’t mean they can afford to implement every single green idea, or that they even know where to start, according to panelists at the Future in Review conference.

“If you can’t be profitable, sustainability doesn’t make sense,” Di Biase said.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell described a project his company did for Wal-Mart helping it unlock sustainable ideas from its own employees. Wal-Mart is notorious for its laser focus on cost reduction, and has started to realize that it can save money by reducing energy consumption in its stores. But the company was having trouble recognizing simple, achievable ideas suggested by employees.

Hewlett-Packard is using Imaginatik’s software to help make improvements to the company’s Labs division, said Prith Banerjee, the new director of HP Labs. Sustainability research is one of the new core components of HP Labs’ research, and it shows up in products that help HP and its customers reduce cooling and power in their huge data centers.

That’s where “innovation software” companies like Invention Machine and Imaginatik come in. Mark Atkins, president and CEO of Invention Machine, helps manufacturing companies develop clever ways to make their products more environmentally friendly without killing their cost structure. Some of his clients are starting to realize that they’ll have to overhaul as much as 70 percent of their products within the next five years to meet sustainability goals, he said.

After adopting tools developed by Imaginatik, Wal-Mart was able to collect thousands of ideas from employees that were getting lost in the old “suggestion box,” and wound up implementing $38 million in cost savings from just four days of idea gathering, Turrell said.

CORONADO, Calif.–There’s more than one kind of “green” in the eyes of the world’s corporations.

Mark Turrell of Imaginatik and Prith Banerjee of HP Labs listen to Steve Di Biase of JohnsonDiversey (left to right) discuss sustainability at FIRe 2008.

He notified Yahoo about the problem during his presentation, but no one seemed concerned, he wrote in a post on Zimbra Forums.

“What does this mean for you? If you use Zimbra to access your Yahoo mail, you almost certainly need to change your password and stop using Zimbra immediately (especially if you’ve ever done so over wireless),” he writes.

Not surprisingly, his hack didn’t place in the competition. “In retrospect it probably wasn’t the best forum to bring up the security defects, but it was the most convenient,” Karau says.

A Zimbra representative wrote in a different post in that forum thread: “This problem has already been addressed in code, and fix is in the next release.”

Passwords used to access Yahoo mail through the Zimbra client are sent over the Internet in clear text, a Canadian programmer says.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said she would check into the matter.

“The Yahoo imap server’s used by the Yahoo Desktop don’t support SSL and the password was being transmitted in plain text,” Karau wrote in a blog post on Friday.

The San Francisco-based Revision3 has enjoyed most of its popularity among the Twitter-friendly geek set, signing deals with blogger personalities like wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk and former CNETer Veronica Belmont.

Last updated at 3:04 p.m. PDT.

Blog guru Leo Laporte twittered about the layoffs several minutes later.

UPDATE: We have heard from a source close to Revision3 that in addition to Lane and Berger, Revision3 has laid off director of comedy programming and Internet Superstar host Martin Sargent and six others. Diggnation producer Glenn McElhose has been laid off as well, but will remain at Revision3 as a freelancer.

The start-up has also dropped its licensing deal with popular Web shows Epic Fu and Wine Library.

In light of the economic downturn and the end of its Revision3 contract, Epic Fu production company Smashface has opted to make some layoffs as well, letting three employees go.

Revision3 posted an explanation to its blog later on Monday morning: the shows Pixel Perfect, Pop Siren, and Internet Superstar have been discontinued. The post did not say anything about how many layoffs there have been, though.

Lifestyle programming director Sarah Lane, a Revision3 mainstay, wrote on her blog on Monday afternoon that she had been laid off as well.

Not surprisingly, news of the layoffs is all over Twitter: the first report of it appears to have come from Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron. He said he had received an e-mail from Damon Berger, senior director of creative and business development at Revision3, who said he was one of those laid off.

“About a week ago Revision3 let us know that despite a year of record revenue and viewership, they are feeling the effects of the economic crunch and need to make some urgent and tough decisions,” a post on Epic Fu’s production company’s blog read. “As of the end of 2008, Revision3 will no longer be the Web licensing partner for Epic Fu, and we’ll be leaving their network of shows. We wish Revision3 luck in the coming months and remain a fan and supporter of their shows.”