What happens when a six-year-old girls sings a song written by her mother for her son who is serving in Iraq? It gets posted on Youtube and gets more than 1.7 million downloads, that’s what.

Tom Nankervis has details.

CACHE, Okla. (UMNS) - Six-year-old Heather Martin, accompanied only by her mother on piano, has become an overnight Internet sensation for a song performed at their rural Oklahoma church.

Written for her brother Shaun serving in Iraq, the song became one of YouTube’s most requested videos of all time in December after a member at Cache First United Methodist Church recorded and posted Heather’s performance on the video-sharing Web site. The video had received 1.7 million hits as of early February.

“My friend called me Christmas Eve and she says, ‘They’ve featured your video and the numbers are just going up and up,’” Cindy Martin said of her daughter’s video. “She said, ‘It’s going to snowball.’ And sure enough, she was right. It’s snowballed.”

Since then, the song has aired on radio station KMGZ-FM in nearby Lawton, Okla., and has become a hit among soldiers overseas.

“I’ve seen an incredible outpouring from the community and from the church,” said the Rev. Jennifer Long, the family’s pastor, who in 2003 lost a family member in a grenade attack in Iraq. “It’s opened a lot of hearts to let out some things that people have been holding in.”

Cindy wrote “When Are You Coming Home?” after learning that 22-year-old Shaun would not be home for Christmas. She and Heather performed the song to give Shaun as a Christmas gift.

“When I had told (Heather) that he wasn’t going to be home for Christmas, she reacted so sadly,” Cindy said. “When I was writing the words, I thought it just really made sense that … it should be written from her point of view.”

The video was recorded during a church service.

More at the link. A TV news report of the family is also onYoutube.

Well, not exactly - only papers made of, well, paper can fold. But it seems that New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years… .” He went on to say that the news outlet will likely move entirely onto the internet. James Joyner has details, including this rejoinder to Pinch’s declaration that the Times’ web site will charge readers to read: “Then the New York Times will exist only as a niche paper. Slate, Salon, and others have tried and failed going the subscription-only route.”

What I’ve not seen anyone point out - a scoop coming here, folks! - is that it simply takes longer to scan and read a newspaper online than on paper. You can flip pages, snapshot headlines printed thereon and quickly read the lead paragraph of a paper edition than you can click and wait for a page to load for an online edition - and then you’re seeing only one story at a time, even if the headlines (and only the headlines) for a section are visible on an index page. I don’t think people will pay to go slower.

But Amazon’s download service is excellent, just slow

Admittedly, Wal-Mart’s video download service is still in beta, which W-M does not disguise, but my experience with it shows it has a long way to go to alpha.

I signed up out of curiousity more than anything else. I have an All-In-Wonder TV card in my computer with cable TV running into it and from time to time I’ll record a movie onto my hard drive. I don’t record “keepers” that way; movies I want for my permanent library I get on DVD, and that’s not very many. The movies I record to hard drive I usually record to VCD resolution, just under 600MB per hour. Sometimes I’ll record a show to timeshift for my wife, and VCD resolution makes it convenient to write it to CD. Furthermore, I watch these shows while I do other work on the computer, with the media player shrunk to a box in the upper-right corner of the screen.

That’s why the W-M video download service appealed to the geeky side of me. It costs more than renting the DVD from Blockbuster (downloads range from $7.50-$9.88, with “hot” movies ranging up to $14.88), but I own the movie as long as I want. That price is also less money than buying the DVD, which I’d do for only a small number of movies anyway, and just as permanent.

But I haven’t able to make the download service work. It seems a simple process, though not a short one. You have to register, of course, and after that you must permit an Active-X control to be loaded, then download and install a series of propietary software control programs, one of which is the actual “Wal-Mart Video Download Manager.” Then you have to give your computer a name on another setup page, then, presumably, you can proceed. This page advises,

By naming you’re computer, you are authorizing it to play the videos you buy on our site. You can also transfer and watch videos on as many as three portable players.

Keep in mind: You can install the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager on as many computers as you like. But, the computer you use to download a video is the only computer you can use to view that video.

“Presumably,” I say, because that’s as far as W-M’s pages will let me go. Their servers refuse to accept any name I try to give my computer on the site, so that’s where it sits as of now. I’ve tried several times as I’ve been writing this, and not only did it refuse to accept any name it also zeroed out my shopping cart.

Although I have not yet been able to download or watch one of the movies, I have learned that you can copy the movie to other media such as a writable DVD, but cannot convert it into actual DVD format. If you want to watch one of the movies on a real TV, you need to download it to a computer that is equipped for TV output, such as a notebook computer. I do not know how large the files are, W-M only claims that they download in a surprisingly short time.

Not only movies can be downloaded. TV shows can, too. For example, you can buy a whole season of Fox’s “24″ for $36.25; single episodes are $1.96. Episodes of the current season are available up to Feb. 5’s show.

Wal-Mart, of course, isn’t the only game in town for this kind of service (and pffft to it, anyway). Amazon.com also has just started a service called Amazon Unbox. Unlike Wally World, Amazon emphasizes downloads of TV shows, charging $1.99 per episode, and also claims DVD quality.

Some of the most popular shows on TV (24, Prison Break, CSI and more) are available for download from Amazon Unbox. Which means you can enjoy them without commercials, and in DVD quality — before they come out on DVD.

It does offer movies, too. Unlike W-M, you can rent a movie by downloading it.

Your rental video can be stored on your PC for 30 days. Once you press play, you have 24 hours to watch the video before it expires.

Rentals seem to average $3.99 each. Download purchases pretty much track W-M’s pricing, with a twist. While both services allow transfer of the movie from PC to portable viewer (can you say iPod, boys and girls?), Amazon says, “you can keep purchased videos on 2 PCs and 2 portable video players at the same time.” Like W-M, you have to download and install propietary Amazon software.

Both W-M and Amazon offer shopping by movie genre, studio and TV channel. It appears to me that Amazon’s TV offerings are far greater and just as current for this season as Wal-Mart’s. I never got W-M to download, but Amazon claimed a DL time of 2.5 minutes for a 6MBPS connection, twice that for a 3MBPS connection, and 52 minutes for a 1.5 MBPS connection; this for a 1.93GB movie file. Well, it took almost an hour to finish downloading to my desktop machine. I ran the speed download speed test at PC Pitstop just afterward, which said that my connection is 3.3MBPS. What gives? I dunno.

Picture and sound quality:

This applies to the mandatory-install Amazon video player: Neither the sound nor the picture approach DVD quality. Heck, the sound isn’t even CD quality. It’s a low-power FM station kind of sound. The video quality is absolutely horrid. The image is extremely low resolution, much, much worse than the VCD video I can record off cable. There is an enormous amount of ghosting and fading with extremely poor color reproduction, all overdrawn with jigglies and swaths of lost detail.

But using Windows media player gives you an altogether different picture. The file is WMV format. I can’t honestly say the video is actual DVD quality, but it is excellent. The sound, however, is stereo and reasonably clear, and that’s it.

Will this kind of service take with the public? No question, I think. It’s convenient and not priced very high. Media storage costs and capacities are low and high, respectively, and I imagine there are a lot of folks like me who are content to keep an eyeball on a movie in the corner or the screen, instantly accessible on a hard drive, for a few dollars, rather than peel bills for a DVD that has to be shelved, located and loaded.

Both services can use a lot more titles, but that will come quickly, I would think. The main market may be the TV shows, though, for people who want to time-shift their favorite programs but don’t have a DVR and are put off by the price of getting one. I think the ability to watch shows on a personal media device will find favor with airline flyers. Amazon even features a way to buy a show on one computer and download it to another. My only complaint is that download speeds are still way too slow, but I am saying that after only one test, I admit.

Try it out! Buy link on the left; rent link on the right:

Update: I learned how Amazon enforces the 24-hours-to view rule. After 24 hours, the video file self-destructs and does not wind up in the recycle bin. Crude but effective.

… of Macintosh users.

Bebo, MySpace, World Cup, Metacafe, Radioblog, Wikipedia, Video, Rebelde, Mininova, Wiki. Thus saith FNC.

… press CTL-ALT-DEL to restart.”

These are dreaded words for Windoze users and they appeared on my machine this morning. This message is a brick wall to booting the machine. I spent 50 minutes chatting with HP’s tech support to no avail whatsoever. The techie was very nice and genuinely interested in solving my problem, but neither he nor the second techie I spent another 30 minutes with gave me any useful solutions at all. They did keep asking whether I wanted to buy a new hard drive and I kept answering that that was option number last.

However, Mr. Google was great. I did not retain all the links I perused, but here’s the skinny. The NTLDR file is a key boot file, along with BOOT.INI and NTDETECT.COM.

This post specifically applies to Windows XP, but a similar (maybe identical) procedure applies to other Windows OSes. What you have to do to fix this error is boot from the Windows CD. If you have a Windows boot floppy, you can boot from that. Start the computer and start pressing the ESC key right away to divert the bootup to the Master Boot selection screen. Use the up and down arrow keys to select either your CD drive of floppy drive, depending on which you want to boot from. Your original Windows installation CD disk is fine. If you have a recovery disk or set, then use the first disk of the set. My HP recovery CDs include eight Windows install CDs and one “recovery” CD, which is the one I used.

Anyway, boot from your selected boot drive and the screen will go through some hardware-checking gyrations. Let it continue until you are given the choice of directories to select for DOS command-line. Choose C:\Windows (selection 3). Then type these commands in sequence. Be careful since DOS commands are error intolerant! Include the spaces.

Type cd \ then press enter; this returns you to the top directory, the C:\ drive itself. CD .. does the same thing.Then type the following commands exactly, pressing enter after each one in sequence:

ATTRIB -H NTLDR
ATTRIB -S NTLDR
ATTRIB -R NTLDR

ATTRIB -H NTDETECT.COM
ATTRIB -S NTDETECT.COM
ATTRIB -R NTDETECT.COM

Then type exit and press the enter key. The computer should start to reboot. If it doesn’t, press CTL-ALT-DEL and when the machine starts to reboot, remove your CD from the CD drive (or floppy from the floppy drive) and let the conputer boot normally.

This procedure completely fixed my computer. I presume this error is pretty rare since I have never suffered it before, and I’ve been computing with Windows machines since 1991.

I discussed some features of Palm’s smartphones, focusing on the newly-announced Treo 680. Some more useful information is here.

Early last month I ditched my very conventional LG VX6100 cell phone and transferred my nmber to a Palm Treo 650 smartphone.

Converting to the 650 was one of those “why-didn’t-I-do-this-months-ago” moments. It was always a pain trying to yank out my Palm Tungsten while driving, look up a number, then dial it on the cell phone. Obviously, it’s not very safe, either. My habit was to wait for the car to be motionless when manipulating the devices, but sometimes that wasn’t possible. The real nuisance, though, was answering while driving, since the 6100 isn’t bluetooth enabled, requiring me to take a hand off the wheel and open the clamshell to answer.

The Treo is bluetooth enabled. I use the Plantronics Voyager 510 bluetooth headset, which I bought on Amazon cheaper than I could find on eBay. To answer, you merely press the button on the side of the mike, same to hang up. I hear callers more clearly using the headset than wthout, and they seem to understand me better as well.

The advantages of having my PDA and phone combined in one unit are enormous. Before I switched, I never forgot my cell phone but forgot the Tungsten more than rarely. I don’t have that problem now.

There is a later, more expensive version of the Palm smartphone called the Treo 700, available in either Palm or Windows OS. While the 650 has 32 MB of native memory, the 700 has 64. Both take an SD card (I have a 1GB card in mine). Apps can be installed onto the native memory or the card in both. Other than native memory, there’s little difference between the two models.

But wouldn’t you know - now Palm just announced a new model, the Treo 680, that sort of splits the difference between the 650 and 700. While both the older models were designed expressly for business users, the 680 is meant for a wider market.

During the DigitalLife show in New York this week,

CEO Ed Colligan emphasized … Palm wants to capture what Palm labels the mobile accomplisher market, which it said is 9x the size of the traditional smartphone target audience.

Palm defines mobile accomplishers as college-educated cell phone owners who are frequently on the go and away from their PC, but still want to strike a balance between their work and personal lives. They’ve thought about getting a smartphone before, but haven’t because of fears it would be too complicated to use or expensive.

Although Palm didn’t give any price specifics, Colligan said that when the 680 starts to enter the market in a month so, it will be the company’s lowest-cost Treo yet. It will also be the easiest to use.

“Suffice it say, with more functionality and more capabilities, it will be very competitively priced in the market than any other smartphone product today, relative to the kind of capabilities this product will bring,” Colligan asserted. “We really tried to push the design to make it more phone like too, so that after using the product, [you’ll find] it’s really a no compromise phone as well as an incredibly powerful computer.”

At 0.8 inch thick, the 680 is less bulky by a tenth of an inch than the 650 or 700. The WaPo reports,

The Treo 680 targets today’s media-hungry consumers. It comes with music, video, and photo slide-show players, and Palm says for a limited time it will sell unlocked versions of the phones with a Yahoo music bundle that will include a 1GB SD Card, a stereo headset, and a 30-day free trial to Yahoo’s music service. Colligan said Palm expects 20 or more carriers around the world to offer the Treo 680 by the end of Palm’s fiscal year next June 1.

Fashion-conscious Treo 680 buyers will be able to choose from four colors: copper, arctic, crimson, and graphite. The Treo 680 has an internal antenna and is smaller and sleeker than previous models. The phone runs the new Palm OS 5.4.

Like the 700, the 680 will have 64MB of native memory, vice 32MB for my 650. Except for the lack of an antenna, though, all the capabilities mentioned above are available, though not all standard, on the 650 or 700, and most of that with freeware. There is a freeware download, VEMode, that converts computer movies or DVDs into small files sizes that can be viewed on the Treo using another freeware download called TCPMP. MP3 playing is standard on the older models.

Among other bells and whistles is the ability to respond to an incoming call with a preset text message such as “I’m busy now.” The bundled Dataviz Documents To Go productivity software now supports viewing Adobe PDF files as well as editing and creating Microsoft Office files.

Okay, the response by text message back to a caller is pretty neat (but an extra-cost service on most carriers). As for PDF docs, there is a freeware program called PalmPDF that works extremely well. Documents To Go is not freeware, but is often included in software kits - I used to use a Sony Clie PDA and DTG was part of the package. I never used it myself, since editing files on my PDA isn’t something that I need to do or that was much fun when I did try it.

All three Treos can browse the web using an extra-cost data plan from carriers. I don’t use such a service because I’m never so far from home, office or notebook computer that I need to. Also, the screen is so small that when trying the demos in the Verizon store I found it pretty impractical.

There are other smartphones out there, of course - Blackberry, HP and Nokia make their own versions using their own OS’s. Cingular offers the 8125, Windows OS model that features a sliding QWERTY keyboard and a screen that displays either landscape or portrait. I may convert to Cingular in April, when my verizon plan expires, because Cingular offers deep discounts to students, staff, faculty and alumni of my alma mater, Wake Forest University (where my son, Thomas, is a freshman, as well).