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Mac clone maker Psystar’s Web store went down again on Thursday evening, the second time in as many days that the company has experienced an interruption in service.

“We’re sorry but the store is temporarily down,” Psystar said in the Store section of its Web site late Thursday. The company has been selling computers preinstalled with
Mac OS X Leopard through that store, in violation of Apple’s licensing policies for Mac OS X.

Psystar’s site went down Wednesday after Powerpay, a payment-processing company, pulled its services from Psystar after the company violated the terms of its agreement with Powerpay, according to a Powerpay representative. It’s not clear what caused Thursday’s outage.

The two other firms, Glass Lewis and RiskMetrics, issued opinions already. Glass Lewis also recommended voting against the compensation committee members: Chairman Roy Bostock, and directors Ron Burkle and Arthur Kern. However, for practical purposes, it’s unlikely the directors actually will be ousted.

The third of the big three proxy advisory services has issued its recommendation on how investors should vote during Yahoo’s upcoming election. The advice: send a message about Yahoo’s overpaid top brass.

With investor Carl Icahn and Yahoo coming to terms, there no longer is an opposing slate running against Yahoo’s board of directors. But there’s still going to be a vote, and Proxy Governance thinks it’s a good time to take a stand.

The firms issue recommendations to their clients on how to vote on proxy matters. These clients include mutual funds, pension funds, and asset management companies, which often hold large blocks of companies’ stock.

“The average three-year compensation paid to the named executives is 480 percent above the median paid to executives at peer companies,” Proxy Governance said in a statement about its advice on Friday. “In light of Yahoo’s relatively weak financial performance, we therefore recommend that shareholders withhold votes from the members of the compensation committee.”

“Given the exorbitant pay levels awarded to the company’s executives in the face of its weaker performance relative to peers, we believe that a stronger emphasis on conditioning certain compensation awards on performance relative to the company’s peers is warranted,” the firm added.

The browser itself is just a reworked version of Internet Explorer, although it won’t import any bookmarks from there. You can, however, enter in any Web address, or pick from a small selection of sites from Double Vision’s content portal.

Transparency isn’t Double Vision’s only forte; it’s got a few other tricks. For instance, you can cut out a specific part of a page just to get at the content. This is especially helpful when visiting YouTube since you can pull out the player and move it to a less conspicuous part of your screen while watching. Hitting the “boss” button combination will also cut out any sound from that video when it’s not the front-most application.

See also: Ghostzilla

What makes the software so special is that you can control the transparency of the browser window and continue to interact with whatever application it’s partially blocking out. This is useful for keeping an eye on your e-mail inbox or IM window while surfing somewhere else. The makers of Double Vision are pushing it as a simple way to watch how-to software videos while using the software (note: this excuse only works if you have one monitor).

This reminds me quite a bit of a now-defunct site called Workfriendly.net, which would skin Web sites to look like a Microsoft Word document. With Double Vision, you’d simply be able to keep working in Word while enjoying the very best of ninja cat.

Double Vision (download) is the latest tool for people who don’t like doing work while at work. This small piece of software lets you casually surf the Web inside of other programs, then hide the window with a simple keyboard shortcut.

These refurbished units come with a 90-day manufacturer’s warranty. You may want to read some of the user comments on the aforementioned Quick Take page, as many users complained about hardware failures. But because these are refurb 510s, hopefully any such issues have been fixed. As always, there’s some dice-rolling involved. The rebate offer (PDF) expires September 30.

Finally, as noted in CNET’s Quick Take, the GO 510 supports TomTom’s optional traffic and weather services. They’re subscription-based, but at least they’re available if you want them.

For example, it sports a 4-inch widescreen display–way better than the 3.5-inch square screens you find on typical discount models. It also doubles as a speakerphone by pairing with your Bluetooth-equipped cell phone. That means you can make and take calls hands-free. Plus, it has a light sensor that’ll automatically dim the screen when you’re driving at night.

This GPS sold for a whopping $700 when it debuted just a couple years ago, but now you can scoop up a refurbished TomTom GO 510 for just $124.99 (plus shipping) after a $36 mail-in rebate. Unlike most models selling in this price range, the GO 510 serves up loads of advanced features.

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TomTom)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

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Cost cutting will lead to the move, said (Gartner)…Open source will be used in the operating system, application server, and at a database level and will make up 30 percent of an application.

The more open-source software we want, the more open-source software we should be prepared to pay for, whether in cash or contributions. This is a fair exchange, and will provide the basis for a robust SaaS software economy for many, many years to come.

Of course it will. Open source is the foundation of software innovation in the 21st century.

One big question remains, however: will open source provide SaaS’ free lunch or will there be a quid pro quo? With AGPL and the Open Software License, it will be the latter. With 20th century open-source licenses, however, SaaS gets a free ride.

Gartner seems to have checked its former open-source blindness at the door, and is now suggesting that 90 percent of all software-as-a-service providers will adopt open source in their infrastructure by 2010.

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This is as true of Apple’s cash position, which BusinessWeek recently noted may soon surpass that of Microsoft’s, as it is of Apple’s product portfolio and business strategy.

It’s the cash that I find particularly surprising. Apple is swimming in cash, more than $20 billion of it. The company adds more than $1 billion in cash to its stockpile each quarter. Today we give Apple a free pass on its iTunes/iPod lock-in, which delivers much of the Apple profits, because we can still happily apply such adjectives as “cool” and “innovative” to Apple.

It’s almost a truism that while Microsoft struggles to do anything right (in the media’s eyes), Apple can pretty much do no wrong.

I suspect that even ardent Apple fans like myself will someday be asking similar questions of Apple. As we buy our way deeper into the Apple ecosystem by adding various pieces of Apple hardware to our homes and offices, Apple will eventually accelerate our dependence on its technology by adding more software offerings (e.g., MobileMe) that make it easier for us to keep this sea of hardware connected and productive.

There was a time that we said similar things about Microsoft and happily bought into the lock-in that we’d eventually come to mistrust and seek to escape. Few are saying this now of Microsoft. And its cash hoard of roughly $23.7 billion has simultaneously become a cause for envy and concern: what will the convicted monopolist do with that pile of money? Can it possibly be in our interest?

At that point, we’ll start looking for a new savior and wonder when we allowed ourselves to become so dependent on Apple, just as we once asked of Microsoft. For the moment, I think the giddiness of having a real choice sends us from Microsoft to Apple, Google, and others.

The U.S. Congress is fixated on taxing the oil and gas companies for their “windfall profits” today, while Apple’s profit margins as a percentage of sales are actually higher than Exxon’s and those of the other bogeymen of Congress.

It won’t last. We’re a fickle lot. I can’t buy Apple’s hardware fast enough today. I’m guessing I’ll regret it tomorrow.

1) Their review process might have been outsourced and some decision tree is being taken too literally

The CastCatcher incident has to once again bring up questions about how Apple is handling App Store rejections. Earlier this year Apple killed an application called Podcaster that let users download podcasts over-the-air directly to their iPhones without using iTunes–a feature Apple did not offer at the time but reportedly plans to offer with the OS X 2.2 update.

The fourth time was definitely not the charm for the developers behind the CastCatcher streaming radio application for the
iPhone.

Mousa wanted to point out that he holds no grudge against Apple, but is frustrated that he is unable to deliver the bug fixes and feature upgrades that his users requested.

The latest update to Return7's CastCatcher iPhone application has been rejected for supposedly using too much bandwidth.

If that’s Apple’s policy regarding streaming radio applications, Mousa is a little puzzled, because he has already released three versions of CastCatcher with no problems since it was first released to the App Store in September. And there are several other streaming radio applications on the App Store, such as the one developed by CBS subsidiary and CNET corporate sibling Last.fm, that also operate over the cellular network using the same amount of bandwidth as CastCatcher, according to Mousa.

Updated 5:15pm with comment from Return7.

UPDATED 5:15pm - Mousa responded to an e-mail asking for further details, quoted in part below.

Should we soon expect to see an iPhone version of the streaming radio channels offered on iTunes?

2) An honest mistake

Mousa says he’s trying to get an answer out of Apple, and I’ll update this post if and when he updates the company blog or responds to an e-mail inquiry. CastCatcher 1.2 is still available on the App Store as of this writing, so perhaps there is something specific to the latest update that triggered the bandwidth concerns, although Amro said in the comments on his blog that he left the bit transfer rates unchanged on the new version.

For the record, it’s not been a terribly long time since Apple rejected the app — roughly a week and in the past they’ve been helpful. Lately, not so much though.

3) They’re adding support for streaming audio in iPhone 2.3 or thereabouts

Apple rejected CastCatcher 1.3 from the App Store on Monday, according to Return7 developer Amro Mousa. The reason? “CastCatcher Internet Radio cannot be posted to the App Store because it is transferring excessive volumes of data over the cellular network, which as outlined in the iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.15, is prohibited.”

I honestly have no idea why this has happened. There were no changes to the streaming code since 1.2 (really nothing significant outside of metadata parsing since 1.0). Bandwidth used depends entirely on the stream provided by the user (i.e. 128kbps streams require that much bandwidth).

At any rate, some of my thoughts on why this might have happened are (purely speculation):

(Credit:
Return7)

Below the photo is a list of some of the newsmakers in the renewable energy business, with a focus on start-ups. Along the way, you’ll get a feel for the technology categories that define this corner of
green tech.

(Credit:
Cool Earth Solar) 1. Ausra: Originally from Australia, Ausra is one of the movers and shakers in solar thermal, a technology that is already competitive with utility-scale fossil fuel power generation.

3. Southwest Wind Power. There are several companies taking different approaches to small wind turbines, designed for homes and buildings. Southwest Wind Power has turbines for remote off-grid locations but it now also has a ground-mounted one for homes. Another company to watch is Aerovironment which just had its small turbines installed at Logan Airport in Boston.

5. Cool Earth Solar. Apart from the great name, this company is taking a potentially disruptive approach to solar electricity. Never mind expensive plants out in the desert. Why not just float reflective balloons in open fields?

Overall, you’ll see that a lot of the action in renewable energy is not in the residential solar panel world, perhaps what most people would think.

Click here to see all of News.com's Earth Day 2008 stories, photo galleries, and more.

Expect it to stay that way in the coming years but not without some bumps. Lux Research predicts a shake-out among the larger companies because supply of polysilicon will overshoot demand in a few years, bringing prices–and a few solar vendors–down.

And will this influx of capital result in cheaper solar panels for average consumers? Yes, but government policies make a huge difference on the economic equation. What’s also needed to make solar really widespread is more flexible financing to lower the hefty upfront cost.

2. SolFocus: Another technology for utility-scale solar power is concentrating photovoltaics (CPV), where light is magnified onto high-efficiency solar cells. SolFocus, incubated at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, is well funded and already has a few customers.

4. First Solar. In the traditional solar photovoltaic market, First Solar the one to catch. The reason is simple: cost per watt. Its cadmium telluride-based panels take up more space than silicon cell panels, but its overall cost has set the mark in a highly competitive field. Hot in pursuit are other thin-film solar companies–Heliovolt, Global Solar Energy, and Nanosolar, which are making cells from yet another material, CIGS (copper indium gallium and diselenide).

Mirrors reflect light onto a liquid that makes steam, which drives a traditional electricity turbine. Other companies have different designs including BrightSource Energy which recently signed a huge deal with Pacific Gas & Electric and eSolar, which is reported to have just raised $130 million. Honorable mention goes to Infinia, which uses a Stirling engine to make distributed solar electricity.

Which are the companies to watch in clean tech? Most are definitely not household names but they are having an impact.

A trial balloon or the face of solar power in the future?

Instead, most of the money is going to utility-scale power plants to make power at peak times of the day. And businesses, helped by favorable financing models, are the big buyers.

But would you pay for the privilege of knowing the latest bit of happenstance pissing him off?

We’re about to find out. Starting Tuesday, Feldman will begin charging 99 cents to people who want view some of his videos and posts. Here’s the link to his video entry where Feldman outlines his thinking.

He may have picked a propitious time to put that proposition to the test. In 2001, the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that half of the people it surveyed said they looked for free alternatives when a site they used asked them to pay for content. “Just 12 percent of them pay for the service and the rest just decide to stop getting that content or service from an online source.” But by late 2007, Pew found that 28 percent of the people it surveyed paid to access or download digital content online. (That compared with 17 percent the year earlier.)

1938 Media impressario Loren Feldman admittedly is an acquired taste. If you’re on the receiving end of one of his skewering rants, I doubt you’ll judge his monologue to be gut-busting hilarious. But the guy’s fresh, and I confess to being a fan boy.

“Why am I doing this? Because I want to. It’s an experiment. I know that most of 99 percent of you aren’t going to pay 99 cents ever. So it goes. But you know what? Content has to be paid for at some point.”

In the end, it’s probably less an issue of cost than quality. Publish something that’s worth viewing or reading and you’ll find an audience–in cyberspace or even outer space.

I have no idea whether he can make a side business charging for the occasional post. Neither, apparently, does Feldman, who acknowledges swimming against the tide.

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Loren Feldman)

The project, which involves eight universities, will take an interdisciplinary approach that brings together experts in artificial intelligence, control theory, robotics, systems engineering, and biology to understand and capitalize on swarming behaviors in nature.

Schools, flocks, packs, and swarms of animals all act cooperatively with limited communication in hostile environments, rapidly and fluidly adapting their hierarchy and roles to suit the circumstances. The question for the Penn team is whether a large number of robot vehicles can be directed to act in a “swarm” mode in response to commands from an omniscient authority. Skynet comes to mind.

“Our objective is to bring together experts in different disciplines who normally do not interact,” said George Pappas, professor of electrical and systems engineering and deputy dean of the engineering school at Penn. “The unique challenge of this program is finding cooperation principles for heterogeneous robots, where different robots may have uniquely different capabilities. How can aerial and ground robots work together? How can teams of robots work with teams of humans? These are some of the challenging questions we hope to address in this project.”

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SWARM)

Scientists are working to imbue unmanned vehicles with the “swarm” mentality found in some animals and insects, allowing armed robots to coordinate their efforts on the battlefield in much the same way piranhas attack a floundering cow.

The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science has received a $7.5 million grant from the military to develop principles of cooperation that mimic biological organisms, then reduce those principles to state-of-the-art algorithms for use in next-generation aerial and ground robots capable of collaborating with humans.

The five-year grant was awarded by the Office of Naval Research under the Defense Department’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program. The other schools include Georgia Tech (PDF) the University of California at Berkeley, Arizona State University, the University of Washington, Michigan Tech, Yale, and MIT. Research on the subject, under a project called SWARM (Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots and Mobile Sensors) and others, is already well under way.

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SWARM)