The cuts come as Qwest and other local phone companies are seeing thousands of customers abandon their old landlines for alternatives, like cell phones and voice over IP services from their cable operators.

Qwest provides local phone service in 14 states, mostly out West. The company has about 12.78 million landlines, a number that dropped 7.3 percent last year from the total in 2006, the AP reported.

The sagging phone business has caused Qwest Communications International to offer hundreds of employees a voluntary buyout as the company continues to tighten its belt.

On Tuesday, Qwest, the third-largest phone company in the U.S., said that it would cut “less than 2 percent” of its 36,843 workforce through a voluntary program. The cuts are targeted at roughly 700 technicians and other Qwest employees who work for the company’s traditional landline business, according to the Associated Press.

The phone company negotiated the buyouts, which are expected to be completed by the end of the month, with the Communication Workers of America union. Qwest had been reducing its workforce through natural attrition, but the voluntary program was put into place to give some employees the option to retire early, which will speed up some departures.

When these will hit the market is unclear: no time estimate was given for when MTI Micro’s fuel cells will actually make it into a GPS device that could wind up in your hands.

MTI Micro’s GPS fuel cell, which uses the company’s Mobion technology, also has a USB interface so that it can be used as a power source for charging other handheld devices, such as cell phones and cameras. Recharging the cell currently involves filling it up with more methanol.

CNET News.com first reported that MTI Micro was working on a fuel cell for GPS devices last month. The embedded methanol fuel cell was ultimately unveiled at the 10th Annual Small Fuel Cells Conference in Atlanta.

The company said it will provide three times as much power as a set of four AA batteries would, keeping the GPS gadget in question powered for up to 60 hours of continuous use. That’s crucial for many users of handheld GPS devices, who are often navigating territory far away from traditional power sources.

Fuel cell manufacturer MTI Micro announced on Friday that it has created a prototype for an embedded fuel cell for handheld GPS devices.

• David Carnoy wonders, “Is Microsoft finally in the Blu-ray camp?”

• CNET Reviews takes a gander at Acer’s new 13-inch slim laptop.

See anything we missed? Write to us at crave dot cnet dot com.

• Microsoft acknowledges the widespread E74 Xbox problems and guarantees warranty coverage. Let’s hope they learned from the RROD repair fiasco.

(Credit:
Photobucket)

• Fujitsu gets all its best ideas from “Mission: Impossible.”

• A new, updated
Zune may or may not look like this.

• The zombie herd of dead retailers brought back to life grows, thanks to Systemax.

Right now, though, online video is a land grab constantly in flux. There are no rules yet, Eisner said, to the point where company strategies can change erratically and make the process all the more complicated. For example, he said, the distribution strategy for The All-for-Nots will be different from Prom Queen because potential content distribution partners didn’t present them with the same deals.

See more stories in CNET News.com’s coverage of SXSWi.

Mark Cuban

AUSTIN, Texas–In a packed conference room at the Austin Convention Center, two high-profile figures in new media took the stage for a highly anticipated interview, and neither one was Mark Zuckerberg.

“I’m the moderator, which I’m not used to being,” Cuban quipped. “We learned a lot from watching the Mark Zuckerberg interview,” he added jokingly, “so I’ll just talk about me.”

“The people that are like me,” Eisner mused, “old mogul-type people, those are probably the people to stay away from. They’ve got three beach houses and four wives.”

Rather, it was billionaire entrepreneur and former Dancing with the Stars contestant Mark Cuban interviewing former Disney CEO and current Web video entrepreneur Michael Eisner at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

The lack of a central distribution channel for online video, Eisner said, makes grabbing eyeballs even more difficult. “Veoh (and) Hulu are development platforms that are becoming kind of the TiVo of the Internet, trying to clarify it,” he explained. “Eventually, we’ll try to organize the Internet onto your home television screen. Right now, I know it seems mind-bogglingly difficult.”

So the content partners this time–which include Bebo, Imeem, YouTube, Hulu, Veoh (which counts Eisner among its board of directors), and Mark Cuban’s HDNet–will be a different set, but Eisner said he doesn’t care, as long as it’s distributed to plenty of eyeballs. “We have to go it any way we can go. We start at the top, we start at the bottom, we start at the sides.” That’s certainly start-up rhetoric.

Eisner talked about Vuguru’s strategy of finding existing “indie” video entrepreneurs on the Web and providing them with big-money resources. “(I) find the people who are doing interesting things on their own,” he said. “I want those people, because I’ll put up a little bit more money and hope that what has always happened in the past will happen in the future, which is that somebody will watch it, and that will drive viewership to our door, and it’s easier because there are a lot of doors out there.”

Eisner told Cuban and the audience that he’s pushing ahead in online video because it’s going to pay to be a pioneer. “All of a sudden, we’re going to wake up, and professionally driven content…for the Internet is going to explode,” Eisner said. Later, he added, “Those people working now in it are going to be the Steven Spielbergs of the next generation.”

Eisner’s investment group, Tornante, launched Vuguru a year ago along with its inaugural series, the teen drama Prom Queen. Despite promotion on MySpace.com and Eisner’s name value, the former Disney chief admitted several months later that the endeavor “didn’t make money” and that he believed Web video was still several years away from profitability.

As he continued, he had a few kind words for Apple czar Steve Jobs, of whom Eisner has famously been more than a bit critical in the past. “Eventually, there will be a few more Steve Jobses around the world who make technology simple.”

“Those people working now in (online video) are going to be the Steven Spielbergs of the next generation.” –Michael Eisner

Yet he’s moving forward with The All-for-Nots. “One of the things that we thought would be interesting in my company was to see if the time had come for story-driven professional content to find a place on the Internet, possibly be monetized, to see where the business was heading,” Eisner said. “It’s been an interesting experience, and we’ve learned a lot.”

But for the most part (minus a lengthy monologue about the difficulties of interactivity on the Web), Cuban left the floor to Eisner to talk about The All-for-Nots, a new Web-based video series created by his new-media production company, Vuguru.

Cuban asked Eisner if he thought traditional media would ever “get” online content. “I think they should participate, and they will eventually be very successful,” Eisner said. “These people are not stupid. They understand what’s happening. The business, though–the economics are so small.” For an emerging field without huge profits (yet), it might not be up their alley.

But Eisner still aligns himself with those old-media moguls in many ways, as he revealed when he fielded a question from the audience about what he thinks of Creative Commons, “remix culture,” and alternatives to traditional copyright.

“Every time you go to a MySpace or MSN or YouTube or Google, every month, they change the strategy,” Eisner said. “People actually paid us money (for Prom Queen).” With The All-for-Nots, he explained, some of the same content partners had wanted Vuguru to pay them and then get the money back through advertising revenue sharing.

It’s a far cry from his days at the helm of Disney. But, the media mogul said, “I like experiments.”

“I have a long history, obviously, of believing in copyright,” he said. “I think basically what separated this country from the rest of the world was patents and copyrights. President Lincoln introduced a lot of this, fought for (the idea that) to pay people for their intellectual work was no different than paying them for their physical work. And nobody would think twice about paying someone for their physical work.”

Michael Eisner

Mark Cuban cracked a joke alluding to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, currently embroiled in a sex scandal, and then let Eisner continue: “For them to get in a van with two other people, and stay in a Days Inn, and travel around the country and shoot (video) on a shoestring is hard.”

That’s why I continue to refer to Web operating systems like G.ho.st as science fair projects. They’re really cool, and they provide glimpses of the evolution of personal computing. Much of what we do on a PC today can be done over the Web. But a lot cannot, at least not well. To deliver the best experience–the best user interface, reliability, collaboration, and so on–smart developers don’t force all their apps either onto the Web or the local PC. Today’s architectures make distributing applications among platforms easier than ever. They even make it possible for apps to adapt to their environment and redistribute themselves depending on circumstance (see Google Gears). The really interesting upcoming apps and operating systems will not just be hybrid (online/offline), but adaptive.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in how copy and paste might work on the iPhone, check out Proximi’s Magicpad, a text editing app that offers cut and paste controls. Proximi has also published video proposing a user interface for general cut and paste on the iPhone. This is the work Apple should have done. Although for all we know, the company has done it already, but in secret.

Cut-and-paste on the iPhone, via a Web service.

I edit a blog about Web 2.0 apps. It’s my job to push the vision of Web-based products and cloud-based resources. But even I realize that local processing has a place. I find it curious that many people I talk to think Microsoft’s rumored Midori project, for instance, is a “cloud OS.” While there’s no question that an operating system written from the ground up today should use Internet resources in a more native fashion than most OSes do today, the change should be seen as one of degree, not replacement.

The Internet can be used to deliver apps and updates, for storage and backup, for social networking and person-to-person communications, and other functions. But for the moment and the near future, you need local processing to maintain speed and robustness of applications, and native graphics capability to present the interface. One of the reasons Web 2.0 apps can work well today is because today’s browsers have deep user interface and graphics capabilities, and because they run on powerful local PCs. Many popular Web apps–like Google Docs and Microsoft Live Search Maps–rely on capabilities that were simply not present in PCs only a few years ago.

iCopy is a clever hack that lets you select text or a link from a Web page and paste it into another page, or an e-mail. It gets around the lack of
iPhone-native copy and paste by sending selected text to a temporary online repository when you “copy,” and retrieving it when you “paste.” In operation, it’s a horrible kludge–it requires a lot of Web page switching and too many visits to the iCopy site to do a simple copy/paste operation. But the fact that Monroe figured out a way to make the Web a giant clipboard in the sky is pretty cool.

iCopy illustrates that while the Web can be employed to do a lot of things that we’ve formerly thought of as belonging solely in the domain of local computing, it doesn’t mean we should do so.

(Credit: iCopy video)

CNET Labs tested the energy consumption of a mix of desktops and laptops recently and found that a mainstream desktop, on average, uses roughly 100 watts when idle. Under heavy use, that number jumps to 145 watts. You can double those figures for a high-end gaming rig with dual graphics cards and other high-powered components. Based again on paying 10.6 cent per kilowatt-hour, you’ll spend $112 per year in electricity to run your gaming PC should you play games for 4 hours, leave it running idle for 8 hours, and keep it turned off for 12 hours. If you let it run idle around the clock for a year, you’ll spend even more–$189 without once plugging in your game controller. (And you thought your bi-weekly expenditure at Game Stop was the only cost associated with your gaming habit.)

Your typical gaming PC adds more than $100 a year to your electric bill.

It’s doubtful that gaming PCs will take on the aura of conspicuous consumption as, say, a Hummer, but leaving it running all day and all night certainly can be viewed as wasteful. A simple Earth Day tip for PC gamers would be to install an auto shutdown add-on or app that will shut down your PC at a specified time each day.

If you’re replacing your light bulbs to create a greener home, you may also want to think about replacing your desktop with a laptop. Like a CFL bulb, a laptop requires a larger upfront cost, but can make it up over time with reduced energy costs. Using a broad mix of laptops, we found that the average laptop when plugged into a wall outlet uses 25 watts of electricity when idle and 62 watts when in use. If you leave your laptop plugged in all day and using the same scenario of 4 hours of heavy use, 8 hours running idle, and 12 hours powered down, you’ll pay only $16 in electricity a year to power your laptop.

If you plan to celebrate Earth Day by picking up a four-pack of compact fluorescent light bulbs, consider turning off your PC before heading out the door. Even when sitting idle, your PC or laptop consumes a considerable amount of electricity. An compact fluorescent light bulb is more energy efficient than an incandescent bulb, turning more of the energy it uses into light and losing less in wasted heat output. A 14-watt CFL bulb has the same light output as a 60-watt incandescent bulb, for example. Replace four 60W incandescents in your home with four 14W CFLs, and (assuming you keep those bulbs on for 8 hours a day and are paying
10.6 cents per kilowatt-hour) you stand to save $57 a year on your electric bill while reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Simply turning off your PC when it’s not in use can save even more electricity.

For more Earth Day 2008 posts, please see CNET News.com’s Green Tech Blog.

Given how Wall Street didn’t seemingly exercise any leadership whatsoever on the subprime mortgage debacles, it’s refreshing to see that they’re actually out in front (at least a little bit) on the climate change issue.

But apparently, the willingness of these utilities to participate in the process of developing The Carbon Principles doesn’t mean everyone in the energy sector is yet reading the writing on the wall regarding climate change. In the February 4 Wall Street Journal, reporter Jeffrey Ball quoted Jeffrey Holzschuh, vice chairman of institutional securities at Morgan Stanley, as saying, “We have to wake up some people who are asleep.”

Last week, three financial titans–Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley–announced “The Carbon Principles” to provide guidance to energy companies in managing carbon risks. The upshot of The Carbon Principles is that these big banks are stating explicitly that going forward, they will only provide debt financing to new power projects if proponents can prove that the proposed plants will remain economically viable under future climate change policies.

The energy sector can’t claim they weren’t at the table. The principles were developed by the banks in consultation with a who’s-who of power industry giants: American Electric Power, CMS Energy, DTE Energy, NRG Energy, PSEG, Sempra Energy, and Southern Company.

Rise and shine! Climate change is a real phenomenon, and carbon legislation is coming–let’s begin to deal with it!

If a remarkable July 2006 letter (PDF) from Stanley Lewandowski, general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association in Colorado is any indication, it would seem there’s still a number of Rip Van Winkels out there in the electric utility world.

A compromise decision allows beer and wine to be served at the Spitfire pub after 3 p.m., but only for scheduled and catered events, according to the report. The pub, which is now expected to open by the end of the month, will also be open for lunch, but alcohol will not be served.

Less than a week after pulling the plug on plans to have a bar as part of an expansion of its Redmond campus, the software giant surprised the bar owner by reversing that decision, according to a report on TechFlash. Microsoft on Friday cited the sensitive business environment as canceling plans for the pub, which was planned as part of a collection of restaurants and stores that were due to open this week at the company’s new Entertainment and Devices unit headquarters.

It won’t be last call for Microsoft’s pub after all.

Amazon trading performance

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

Amazon fell 9.93 percent to end the day at $55.86 a share, with little news out on the company. Amazon, however, is set report its third-quarter results on October 22.

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

Apple and Intel stock performance

Tech stocks, overall, were down, with the CNET Tech Index giving up 39.15 points to end the day at 1,228.68.

Shares of Amazon.com sold off sharply Tuesday, and Apple failed to swim against the tide despite rolling out a revamped MacBook line, as the broader markets gave up gains from its stellar performance a day earlier.

Apple, meanwhile, received little love from investors, after rolling out its new MacBook lineup. The computer maker’s stock fell 5.6 percent to end the day at $104.08 a share. Investors, who in general were selling off stocks across the board, may have also been less than happy that the computer maker was rolling out an under-$1,000 notebook.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, “Tough times for tech.”

Intel, meanwhile, jumped as much as 6 percent in after-hours trading, after reporting a 12 percent increase in third-quarter profit. Intel, which reported its quarterly results after the markets closed, ended the day down 6.24 percent to $15.93 a share, during the regular trading hours.

This leads to an unusual situation in which the House Democratic leadership, which has objected to retroactive immunity without learning more about what kinds of activities it would shield, has a few options:

By a 191-229 vote on Wednesday afternoon, the House failed to approve a bill to extend the Protect America Act for 21 days in its current form. The law–which Republicans say is necessary to allow interception of communications that transit the United States–is scheduled to expire on Saturday.

1. Give Bush what he wants. This would mean admitting defeat and approving the immunity shield that the Senate already did on Tuesday.

The vote, in which 34 Democrats joined the Republicans, comes hours after President Bush called for including retroactive immunity for any companies that may have violated federal privacy laws by opening their networks to the National Security Agency. Lawsuits against companies including AT&T are currently pending in federal court.

3. Let the Protect America Act expire. This is politically risky in an election year, of course, but the Bush administration’s arguments for passing the law in the first place were based on partial, calculated leaks of secret court rulings. If the Republicans want the Protect America Act so badly, force them to negotiate on that separately from retroactive immunity–the issues really aren’t linked.

And there are probably others that I haven’t thought of.

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have scuttled an attempt to grant a temporary extension to a controversial wiretap law–that did not include retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.

2. Wait and try again. If the Republicans insist that this bill is necessary (which is hardly clear–we’ve survived for decades without it), the Democrats could hold another temporary renewal vote on Friday at 11 p.m. and dare the GOP to block this supposedly vital legislation a second time.

It’s a little unclear what’s going to happen next; as I write this, the House has moved on to a not-exactly-controversial measure congratulating the New York Giants for winning the Super Bowl. We have a call into the House Majority Leader’s office and will update you when we hear back.