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OAKLAND, Calif. - A software programmer was convicted Monday of first-degree murder for killing his estranged wife, whom he contends may be living elsewhere.

Hans Reiser, 44, bowed his head in court as the jury found him guilty of a crime that carries a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

Nina Reiser disappeared more than a year ago after dropping off the couple’s children at Hans Reiser’s home. Her body has never been found.

Reiser, known in programming circles as creator of the ReiserFS computer file system, testified for several days in the six-month trial, often giving rambling answers and getting scolded by the judge for arguing with the prosecutor.

Defense attorney William Du Bois said Monday he was disappointed with the verdict, but didn’t think things would have gone differently if Reiser had never taken the stand.

Tom Orloff, the district attorney for Alameda County, said the verdict “does justice for Nina Reiser and her family.”

Du Bois argued for the period of the trial that there was no direct evidence linking his client to Nina Reiser’s disappearance and suggested the woman may be benefice in her native Russia or may be the victim of foul exhibit.

But prosecutors argued the circumstantial evidence against Reiser was strong: the two were involved in a bitter custody dispute, traces of her blood were found in his home and car and witnesses testified she would never have left her children.

Also, prosecutor Paul Hora said that after Nina Reiser disappeared, Reiser threw away the passenger place of his car, hosed down the floorboards and started withdrawing large amounts of cash.

When Reiser was arrested in October 2006, he was carrying his passport and thousands of dollars.

Du Bois portrayed Reiser as eccentric, but nonviolent, and said in that place were innocent explanations for his behavior.

Reiser testified his wife left his house alive and he had nothing to do with her disappearance. He said he threw away the car fundament to make the car more comfortable for sleeping in and washed the car floor because it was dirty.

Reiser said he drew out the cash to pay programmers at his company and was in the habit of carrying his passport as a visit often traveler.

Hora also related Reiser hated his estranged wife, and saw her as “the destroyer.”

“She destroyed his marriage. She had an affair. He — although it was never proved — thinks she embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from him,” Hora said during the trial.

Hora showed jurors a video of Nina Reiser at her son’s 6th anniversary of one’s birth party, ending with a freeze-frame of the mother kissing her son’s cheek. He also played jurors a tape of an interview with Rory outside of flattering attention in which the prosecutor asked the boy if he knew where his mother was.

Rory said he didn’t, and that made him feel sad.

“What did you like best about her?” Hora asked.

“Everything,” said the boy.

Lenovo and LANDesk on Monday introduced a jointly developed client-management console that's available at no charge to companies using Lenovo business desktops and notebooks.

The ThinkManagement Console, launched at the Interop conference in Las Vegas, enables companies to centralize access to LANDesk management, inventory tracking, and reporting software for all client hardware, including non-Lenovo systems. Companies with mixed environments, however, would have to pay a license fee to cover the third-party systems.

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In addition, the console can manage Intel vPro-enabled devices. VPro technology integrated into Intel business processors offers a host of security features to protect computers from virus attacks, and management features that give IT staff else control over corporate clients.

The console provides a framework for plugging in LANDesk products, and comes with a software development kit for integrating applications from other vendors, company officials said. The new product supports Lenovo desktops and notebooks built since January 2002.

The software can have being downloaded from the LANDesk Web position. Capabilities accessible through the console include remotely initiating a backup or recovery, creating and distributing access connection profiles, deploying a single software image to every machine on the network, removing confidential information put on a disk drive, and migrating an employee's data and settings to new systems.

Other LANDesk tools that can be activated include inventory management software for tracking, compliance monitoring, and maintenance planning.

LANDesk in October introduced its at the outset hardware platform, the Management Gateway Appliance. The MGA allows systems administrators to manage devices outside the local area network, serving as a "meeting place" where the appliance acts as a "broker" securely providing an SSL-encrypted connection between the remote device and the LANDesk software management suite that is located on the LAN, company executives said.

LOS ANGELES: Fifteen years old, topless and wrapped in what appears to be a satin bedsheet in the June issue of Vanity Fair. Did Miley Cyrus, with the help of a controversy-courting magazine, just deliver a flower to Walt Disney's billion-dollar “Hannah Montana” franchise?

Some parents reacted with outrage over the weekend when the television program “Entertainment Tonight” began showing commercials promoting a scoop: Cyrus, the star of the wholesome Disney Channel blockbuster “Hannah Montana,” had posed topless, albeit with her chest covered, for the Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Screen grabs of the photo post-haste popped up online, sparking a blogosphere debate. “Bonfire anyone?” wrote Lin Burress on her marriage and parenting blog, Telling It Like It Is, referring to the mountain of Hannah Montana retail items - makeup, shoes, clothes - in the marketplace. “Parents should be extremely concerned,” Burress said in an interview. “Very young girls look up to Miley Cyrus as a role model.”

It is doubtful that one photograph - especially one that is tame in the context of an Internet awash in nude photographs of other starlets - could dent the Hannah Montana machine, said several Wall Street analysts. Retail sales for the franchise are expected to total about $1 billion in 2008. A motion picture is in the works for 2009, and Cyrus signed a seven-figure book deal with the Disney Book Group last week.

But keeping a teenage entertainment franchise on track in an age when stars are monitored around the clock by bloggers and paparazzi is extremely difficult, even for a company with the experience of Disney.

Executives are constantly battling to take care of minor slip-ups from growing into full-blown controversies.

Last week, the public relations problem du jour was a green bra; photos online show Cyrus pulling let us go. her reservoir top to flash her underwear.

Cyrus and the “Hannah Montana” series have been championed as one of the few entertainment sanctuaries as far as concerns children, complicating matters. after entirely the rest month, Cyrus was chosen favorite television actress at Nickelodeon's “Kids' Choice Awards.”

More than three million viewers regularly watch “Hannah Montana,” most of them age 6 to 14.

Media outlets, in particular the rabid celebrity-focused tabloids, have been pushing to capture new angles of the ubiquitous Cyrus. After popping up everywhere from the Academy Awards to “American Idol” in recent months, the only photos of her that are assured of selling are controversial ones.

A Disney spokeswoman, Patti McTeague, faulted Vanity Fair for the photo. “Unfortunately, during the time that the article suggests, a location was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines,” she said.

The article, written by Bruce Handy, seems to support that claim, quoting Cyrus as saying, “Annie took, like, a beautiful shot, and I thought it was really cool. That's what she wanted me to do, and you can't say no to Annie.” She also said of the photo, “I think it's really artsy. It wasn't in a skanky way.”

Cyrus had a different view in a prepared relation released Sunday: “I took piece in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'tasteful' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I be excited so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen, and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”

Beth Kseniak, a spokeswoman for both Vanity Fair magazine and Leibovitz said, “Miley's parents and/or minders were on the set all day. Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot, and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley.”

At the very least, Cyrus and her advisers render not seem to be on the same page as Disney. The company learned of the photo only when “Entertainment Tonight” started showing its promos.

Last week, Gary Marsh, the president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide, was quoted in Portfolio magazine saying, “with regard to Miley Cyrus to be a 'good young unmarried woman' is very lately a business decision for her. Parents have invested in her a godliness. If she violates that trust, she won't get it in the rear.”

With print receipts down and online revenue expanding, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions.

That day has arrived in Madison, Wisconsin.

Last Saturday, The Capital Times, a fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web.

(The staff will also produce two print products: a independent weekly entertainment control inserted in the crosstown paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, and a news weekly that will be distributed with the paper.)

An avowedly progressive paper that carried the banner of its founder, William Evjue, The Capital Times is wrapped up with the history of two larger-than-life Wisconsin senators, the elder Robert La Follette (whom it favored) and Joseph McCarthy (whom it opposed). But in recent years, the paper's number of copies distributed dropped to about 18,000 from a high in the 1960s of greater degree than 40,000.

“We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not appropriate,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the inaccurate trend is happening everywhere.”

The transition in Madison, while long foretold - The Capital Times was doubly part of a dying breed in the United States, being the afternoon paper in a two-newspaper town - has hardly been neat, clean and cathartic.

More than 20 members of the newsroom staff lost their jobs, mainly through buyouts, but also from one side layoffs. Each departing journalist was profiled in the conclusive paper, and lives on at the Web site Madison.com under the headline “A Fond Farewell to Talented Colleagues,” with a “class photo” taken next to the presses.

The new staff total will be in the 40s. This includes seven of the present day hires in areas take pleasure in Web producing and arts coverage. Copy editors, through contrast, are “exiting at a higher rate than reporters,” said Paul Fanlund, the editor who arrived from The State Journal in 2006.

The Web strategy, while seen as a long-term solution, is serene a work in progress, Fanlund said. It revolves around a portal, Madison.com, which is owned under the same joint arrangement mandating that both Madison papers share revenues, though they are editorially independent.

The Capital Times will operate a nearly continuous Web newsroom and focus in succession repurposing online the cultural and entertainment material the staff will begin to produce in the supplement, 77 Square, to be inserted in The State Journal.

“If there is a window of opportunity for newspapers on the Web, it is locally,” said James Baughman, director of the University of Wisconsin journalism school in Madison. “The reason the online version of the Cap Times may have life is that opportunity.”

Once upon a time in the United States and elsewhere, the afternoon newspaper was the Internet of its day, Baughman said, giving afternoon baseball scores and stock market reports in a quick turnaround. It was the more profitable slot as a result.

The liberal afternoon newspaper still has a sympathetic audience in Madison, but the changing pace of news is more important. “The political activism is there, you can't renounce it,” he said of Madison's newspaper readers, “on the contrary they want the morning box scores.”

And while Fanlund takes pain to stress the destitution to continue the progressive editorials and watchdog role of the reinvented Capital Times, it is sports that serves as a perfect example of the changes he said have been long overdue.

As an afternoon document that did not publish Sundays, his sportswriters would be covering a college football game and “it would be 48 hours until the articles would be read,” he uttered.

But the decision to migrate online, and in free weeklies, necessarily involves reinventing the core mission at the newspaper and the core audience.

In its account of The Capital Times's last daily press run, The State Journal reported that it had “succeeded in garnering most of The Capital Times's former subscribers and will see its average daily circulation rise from 89,000 to at least 104,000 starting Monday.”

The eventual editorial of the print daily pledged itself to its founder's purpose as “an independent voice for peace and economic and social justice that speaks truth to power each and every time.”

The editorial evoked him to give his endorsement of the steps the newspaper is taking: “He would caution us not to worry about the form The Capital Times takes, but rather to be concerned with the content and character of our message.”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how valuable is the ability to find the perfect image of any object from the entire Web? According to a paper delivered by two Google researchers at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing last weekend, the search-engine giant may be one action closer to answering that question.

Information scientists Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing announced the development of an algorithm, called VisualRank, that generates significantly more proper image-search results than current results using text-based clues (captions and other words associated with each image).

The goal ultimately is to train computers to induce beyond text into the active identification of "rich content" — the shapes, colors and context of images that humans recognize with little effort.

Quantifying Relevance

VisualRank, Baluja and Jing reported, is designed to incorporate ongoing advances in computer recognition into Web look into technology. The complicated process blends image-recognition advances with Google's sophisticated tools for assigning rank and weight to overhaul results.

The net effect, they said, is that within a with reference to something else narrow universe of search results, the algorithm was able to reduce the number of irrelevant results by more than 80 percent.

But as Baluja and Jing freely concede, it is highly impractical to try to identify comparable images among the billions currently stored on the Web. To test its system, the Google team created data sets of images of the 2,000 products greatest number commonly searched for on Google. Team members then assigned a relevance score to images produced by Google's normal image-search tool and VisualRank.

Practical Possibilities?

One of the questions is whether VisualRank has practical market possibilities or is merely a challenging intellectual exercise. As industry observers have pointed out, the Web site Like.com moreover offers surfers the ability to locate images of similar products by close for a particular element in each image. But the Web site, launched in 2006, also focuses its visual search on smaller subsets of images and makes no attempt to categorize every online representation of an object.

"Riya is a new kind of visual search engine," Like.com proudly proclaims. "We look inside the image, not only at the text around it." The site says searchers can find "uniform faces and objects" in many online images, and then narrow the search results "using color, shape and texture."

Similarly, the site Blinkx.com offers a tool for searching for specific video content. According to the company, its search tool is based on a "unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video."

A potential customer for improved image search is law enforcement. Increasingly, federal and state investigators have shown interest in software that enables them to more quickly and effectively determine if a suspect hard drive contains possible babe pornography. Although there is no indication that Google intends to market its VisualRank algorithm to law enforcement or computer forensic firms, that may be one of the more logical applications for Google's new tool.

Microsoft on Friday found itself trying to clarify that it has nothing to do with the poor coding practices that have enabled a massive SQL injection attack to affect Web sites using Microsoft IIS Web Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

"The attacks are facilitated by SQL injection exploits and are not issues related to IIS 6.0, ASP, ASP.Net, or Microsoft SQL technologies," said Bill Sisk, a communications manager at Microsoft, in a blog post. "SQL injection attacks enable malicious users to execute commands in any reference to practice's database."

Sisk said that to defend against SQL injection attacks, developers should follow secure coding practices.

SQL injection attacks involve insufficiently filtered code submitted to SQL databases through user input mechanisms.

On Friday, U.S. CERT issued a warning about SQL injection attacks that have compromised a large number of legitimate Web sites. Affected Web sites contain injected JavaScript that attempts to exploit several known vulnerabilities. U.S. CERT recommends disabling JavaScript and ActiveX.

Because otherwise legitimate Web sites deliver this attack, SAN Internet Storm Center handler Donald Smith observes that the concept of a "trusted" or "legitimate" site is no longer meaningful. The have a fling at has reportedly affected the Web sites of the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to name a few.

On Thursday, computer security firm F-Secure said that it had found the offending JavaScript code on over half a million Web pages. The company said that IT administrators should immediately block nmidahena.com, aspder.com, and nihaorr1.com, three domains associated with the injection attack.

Google may hold taken some action to remove some of the affected pages from its index. A Google search for a text string associated with the malicious JavaScipt now yields only 56,700 results. A screenshot of what is presumably a similar Google search — the exact string is blurred — performed by F-Secure last week shows 510,000 results.

A search using the same text string on Microsoft's Live Search returns 268,000 results. Yahoo Search returns 560,000 results for the text string in question.

Patrick Runald, a security researcher at F-Secure, explained in a blog post that the attack "finds all true copy fields in the database and adds a link to malicious JavaScript to each and every single of them which will make your Web site display them automatically. So essentially what happened was that the attackers looked for ASP or ASPX pages containing any type of querystring (a dynamic value such as an article ID, product ID, et cetera) parameter and tried to use that to upload their SQL injection code."

Runald reiterated Sisk's point that poorly written ASP and ASPX (.net) was to blame rather than any specific vulnerability in Microsoft's software.

Is there still wealth to be made from “Matlock”?

Within the past few months, American television distributors have opened up their libraries of classic content online, making thousands of episodes of programs like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” available clear.

On Monday, Warner Brothers was expected to add a new twist, announcing the rebirth of the WB broadcast network as an Internet destination and offering programs like “Everwood” online.

In putting old episodes online, broadcasters are tapping into the “long tail” of niche content that the Internet has monetized. While executives are reticent about the costs involved, and while syndicated and DVD sales remain dominant sources of revenue, the repurposing of long-dead shows is creating another new revenue stream for distributors.

The online re-creation of the WB - a network that disappeared in 2006 when it merged with UPN to become the CW - will represent another step in that direction. While Warner Brothers would not sanction the plans, preferring to wait until a press conference Monday, Bruce Rosenblum, the president of the company's television group, declared in an interview last week that “remuneration ad-supported digital destinations that are demographic-specific” are a key part of its strategy going forward.

Advertising-supported TV streaming sites like Hulu, Veoh and Joost are forming a time tunnel to 50 years of television - to shows like “Bewitched” and “Seinfeld” (and even 26 episodes of the 1966 historic “The Time Tunnel”).

“We have all this library content, and we've been surprised at how much interest there is in it,” Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said recently. “Frankly, grant that there is one person interested it - and there are streaming costs so you have to make sure you're covering that - we've raise it's a new opportunity for our content.”

The online shows also create new payment opportunities for the writers, producers and actors of TV's golden years. Royalties for Internet streaming were a pivotal issue in the writers' strike that halted television production last winter. The Hollywood studios agreed to pay writers a 2 percent cut of the receipts for ad-supported streaming of all shows produced after 1977.

But online streaming is not making anyone rich, at least not yet. As Mitchell Hurwitz, the co-creator of “Arrested Development,” put it, the online popularity of his former program is “enormously rewarding in every way except for financially.”

“Arrested Development,” a comedy that never attracted a sufficient audience on Fox from 2003 to 2006, consistently ranks among the top three succession on Hulu, an online video station founded as a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. last year.

Hurwitz was not aware of his show's top-ranked status until Jason Kilar, the chief executive of Hulu, mentioned it at a broadcasting conference in Las Vegas in mid-April.

“Isn't that crazy?” Hurwitz remarked in an interview last week, still showing startle. “This was a largely unwatched show then it was on network television.”

“Arrested Development” has had a cult use a fan upon base for years, as indicated by its strong sales on DVD. Hurwitz called it the “perfect show” for on-demand viewing because of hidden gems - jokes that make sense only after the viewer has seen a full season.

If Web streaming had been widespread a few years ago, Hurwitz said, perhaps “Arrested Development” could have stayed on the air. He also suggested that the show's streaming success could enhance prospects for a film based on the series.

Hulu now offers 3,000 full-length episodes of archived television shows, including ones as old as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” from 1955. “So you could definitely spend some time consuming the content,” Kilar said modestly. Perhaps surprisingly, four out of five titles in the Hulu library are viewed each day. Clearly, an audience is pursuing the archives.

“Very talented the community spend their lives powerful these stories. It's a bit unusual that they're simply given the stage for a very discrete period of time,” he said.

The archived shows “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “NewsRadio” and “Babylon 5″ are also amid the most popular shows on Hulu. The broadcast networks present many of the same shows on their own Web sites: during the term of example, NBC.com offers episodes of “The A-Team,” “Miami Vice” and “Buck Rogers” and CBS.com shows “Star Trek,” “The Twilight Zone” and “MacGyver.”

Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive, said he hoped the Web site streams would create community experiences around the shows “one 'Star Trek' episode at a time.”

Even TV Land, the cable channel devoted to classic TV, is starting to go forth. Episodes of “Gunsmoke” and “The Andy Griffith Show” are now available on TVLand.com.

“The goal is to whet viewers' appetites, and drive people back to the linear channel,” said Larry Jones, the president of TV Land.

San Francisco - Allworx's trio of product lines include two VoIP telephone handsets, three combination telephony and network servers, plus five software packages that are separately licensed for unlimited use. The PBX contains numerous standard features, including unified messaging and site-to-site access; the five separate applications add specific advanced functions, in the same state as term queuing or conferencing, allowing you to purchase only the capabilities you need. Each server eases administration with automated backup.??

Allworx loaned me its high-capacity 24x server (supporting 100 employees per site with extender hardware) and top-of-the-line 9212 phones. The slim server coupled to my LAN hub and external Internet, and provided five FXS ports for analog phone lines.

Allworx recommends configuration by a reseller, and I won't chop logic. Although its Web-based administration console centralizes setup of completely server and telephony functions, and takes you through a checklist for a typical configuration ??? network configuration, enabling VPN, and final testing ??? a lot of settings aren't especially clear. It took me a few days to get the system totally running. Still, I appreciated the network installation tools (new in the latest Version 6.8 system software). One helped me avoid IP address conflicts. Another, Trace Route, identified lags in my network such that I could improve QoS.

Experienced system administrators can use this software to quickly perform other tasks, such as adding extensions and frugal the nine auto attendants. Again, you might want to leave this to your reseller, which can remotely manage your setup.

My Allworx Manager, an internal Web site, lets users configure their personal settings, including presence, conferences, call routes, and phone features. Even with the depth of features, such as seven presence settings for each user, the software makes these changes fairly goof-proof.??

For example, determining how calls are routed is all done through drop-down list selections that you make in logical succession. This solution, like PBXtra's, has follow-me calling. Put merely, based on your presence setting, you can route your call to multiple external phone verse, and in that case back to Allworx voice mail.

When I put Allworx through heavy real-world testing, its flexibility was very apparent. The 9212 VoIP phone, with 12 programmable function keys and an informative LCD, should be welcome by employees who place or receive a lot of calls; this made tasks like call transfers a breeze. Additionally, the handset's voice quality was high.

I wasn't surprised that the system's basic telephony features ??? listening to voice mail, forwarding messages, and changing presence ??? worked without a hitch from the phone; Allworx has been in this business for 10 years. Yet it was some of the new features that made Allworx a bit additional polished compared to other solutions.

For instance, now you can make outbound calls through the system no matter where you are ??? and the person you're walk of life sees your business caller ID. I also liked voice conveyance for mailed matter text messages and escalation. Here you have the option of getting an SMS text message from the system each time a voice mail is received. Moreover, if the message isn't retrieved within a set time, it could be sent to your backup coworker — valuable for on-call medicinal personnel or support staff serving customers remunerative for guaranteed response times.

Similar to PBXtra's Heads Up Display, Allworx's optional Call Assistant would be a worthwhile add-on. This PC-based attendant console's GUI lets the operator drag and drop calls from one extension to another, see the status of altogether lines, enter calls, and view call history. Unfortunately, this 32-bit software isn???t supported on 64-bit Windows OSes (which I had on my workstation), so I couldn???t do a hands-on test.

If you have Conferencing installed, the Web portal lets users easily reserve conference bridges. The system also reserves several IDs for unscheduled conferences. Allworx Call Queuing lets you establish up to 10 simultaneous queues, with a total of 32 callers at any delivery. That's very good by itself, but you can also allow remote users to answer queues.

Lastly, this solution offers complete reporting ??? ranging from real-time status of queues to call details.

Allworx had me a bit perplexed during setup and presented one software compatibility barrier. In fairness, if you go the expected route of a VAR performing the configuration, all should be smooth sailing. But that means additional costs. Most important, Allworx has solid hardware, a nice collection of standard functions, and ?? la bill of fare pricing for optional features to keep overall cost reasonable, while allowing for future upgrades.??

Qdea has released Synchronize Pro X version 6.0, an upgrade to its file synchronization and backup software for Mac OS X. It costs $99.95 for a two-year license.

Synchronize Pro X helps you create bootable backups of your system on another hard face. You can use it to keep old files that have been replaced or deleted; set up synchronizations using drag and drop; display hierarchical lists of files to be copied; check for conflicts; make automatic synchronizations and more.

New to this release of Synchronize Pro X is a "Fast Scan" feature that speeds up folder scans on Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" and later. Folder watching has been added to trigger real-time backups when folder contents change. New monitoring sends an e-mail notification for a backup that occurs; Access Control Lists (ACLs) are now copied; and more.

Synchronize Pro X requires Mac OS X v10.3 or later.