Very Important Information about Environment, Family And Relationships And More

You can be the virtual Hero of the Hudson.

An online video game inspired by the heroics of Flight 1549’s crew offers players the chance to try landing a plane in the Hudson River.

The instructions for the game tell you to use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to keep the plane level with the water as it plunges from an altitude of 1,500 feet. It begins with the warning, “The fate of passengers is in your hands!”

If you get it wrong, the jet crashes and sinks into the river with an ominous gurgling sound.

The pilot of the US Airways flight was forced to ditch the plane in the river after a collision with a flock of birds knocked out both engines. All 155 aboard survived the Jan. 15 splash-landing.

Shares in Nintendo Co Ltd sank 12 percent after the Wii video game maker cut its earnings and game console sales forecasts, raising doubt over growth at a company that had previously defied the global financial crisis.

But some analysts said the latest forecasts from Nintendo, the creator of game characters such as Mario and Donkey Kong, were excessively conservative and the sliding share price presented a buying opportunity.

“Nintendo shares have enjoyed a certain premium as people thought the company would do well even in economic conditions like this,” said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management.

“But now, a question mark is hanging over that assumption.”

The shares fell by their daily maximum move of 4,000 yen to 28,300 yen on Friday after the maker of the Wii game console and DS handheld gear cut on Thursday its annual operating profit forecast by 16 percent to 530 billion yen ($5.9 billion).

Nintendo had been seen as escaping the worst of the recession spreading around the world, on the view that people seeking to cut entertainment spending would stay home and play games.

But, like other Japanese manufacturers, it has been hit by a soaring yen that cuts profits on products they sell overseas. The yen has been hitting 13-year highs against the dollar.

A deepening recession in Japan is also starting to bite. The company blamed slower demand as the country slides into a downturn when it cut its sales target by 1 million Wii consoles to 26.5 million for the year to March 31.

Nintendo’s strategy to broaden the gaming population by offering innovative but easy-to-play games has been a roaring success, with the Wii far outselling Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360.

Nintendo’s operating profit is forecast to be 28.67 billion yen in January-March, Reuters calculations showed, based on its results for the nine months through December and full-year forecast.

That would be two-thirds smaller than the previous year, a sharp swing from a 21 percent rise in profits for the October-December quarter.

“Although economic conditions are bad, we think the company’s (annual) forecasts are too cautious,” Nomura Securities said in a note to clients. “We think Nintendo is under-appreciated as one of Japan’s top-earning manufacturers.”

Even the newly revised operating profit target would be a record figure, and Nintendo raised its annual sales forecast for its DS handheld console by a million units to 31.5 million even as it cut its sales projection for the Wii.

“We believe the stock will almost certainly react negatively in the near-term. However, we would see a drop in price as a chance to buy on weakness,” Goldman Sachs said in a research report.

The explosion of text messaging, usually in English, threatens the survival of many languages. But with the right technology, the humble mobile phone can actually be a powerful tool to save them - and it makes business sense too.

With linguists fearing that half the world’s languages will disappear in the near future, many language advocates are pushing to make more written languages available on cellphones, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

At least 200 languages have enough speakers to justify development of cellphone text systems, says Laura Welcher, director of the Rosetta Project of San Francisco’s Long Now Foundation, which was established ‘to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years’.

‘Technology empowers the poorest people,’ she told the Journal.

Enabling a mobile phone set for a language, however, involves more than just printing letters on the number keys.

Keying in the message is cumbersome on a 12-key handset, requiring multiple taps on keys to select some letters. It is even harder in languages with more than the 26 letters of English.

In Hindi, spoken by 40 percent of India’s billion-plus population, texting ‘Namaste’ can take 21 key presses as the language has 11 vowels and 34 consonants.

That is where the role of predictive text, a user-friendly technology that reduces the number of key taps necessary to type in a word when using a limited keypad, comes into play.

Typing ‘Namaste’ with predictive text takes just six key taps.

Nuance Corp. of Burlington, Massachusetts, which dominates the predictive text market, says that in 2006, cellphone users in India with predictive text in their handsets averaged 70 messages a week; those without it averaged 18.

The majority of users activate predictive text capability on their phones because, according to calculations by Nuance unit Tegic Corp., it is 30 percent faster than using the traditional method of hitting the ‘2′ key once for ‘a’, twice for ‘b’ or three times for ‘c’ with a Roman alphabet.

Michael Cahill, linguistics coordinator for SIL International, a Dallas-based organisation working to preserve languages, said ‘there are cases where texting is helping to preserve languages’ by encouraging young people to write in their native tongue.

Native-language boosters in Ireland and Britain have successfully pushed for development of the Gaelic and Welsh languages on mobile phones for texting so they remain relevant for youngsters, the Journal said.

Breandan Mac Craith, marketing director for Dublin-based Foras na Gaeilge, which promotes Gaelic, said: ‘It’s extremely important that language isn’t something that’s only in books.’

In 2006, Foras began working to develop texting software for the Irish language with market leader Tegic. Once the software was available, Foras started pushing service providers and handset makers to install it on their phones.

Last year, Samsung Corp., trying to steal a march on market leader Nokia Corp., added an Irish-language handset to its line, the Journal noted.

In other parts of the world, language text capability of mobile phones can be crucial to economic development and helping people who don’t speak or read English buy and sell goods.

Indian mobile telephone service operators offer at least 12 of the nation’s 22 official languages, and Tegic says it is working to add Kashmiri to the list.

Christy Wyatt, vice president of software at handset manufacturer Motorola Corp, said: ‘Predictive text is one of the technologies that has opened up the handset.’

Companies that develop predictive text say they have created cellphone software for fewer than 80 of the world’s 6,912 languages catalogued by SIL International.

Obviously, a lot more requires to be done.

As if Steve Jobs and Apple haven’t commanded enough headlines during the past couple of weeks. Late Friday, Bloomberg reported that Jobs is considering a liver transplant.

In a telephone interview with Bloomberg’s Connie Guglielmo, Jobs refused to comment on his health status: “Why don’t you guys leave me alone–why is this important?”

The article, which quotes anonymous sources said to be “monitoring his illness,” says that Jobs is weighing the transplant “as a result of complications after treatment for pancreatic cancer in 2004.”

A spokesman for Apple said the company had no comment on the report.

On Wednesday, Jobs announced he was stepping aside for a six-month medical leave of absence. The mystery over his drastic weight loss has fed all sorts of speculation about what’s ailing him. In an e-mail to Apple employees, Jobs wrote the following:

“…during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought. In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”

“I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.”

Jobs, who is the closest to what is a rock star in the tech industry, wants his private life to be private. And like other celebrities, he would prefer that people stop obsessing about his health or other aspects of his private life. But it goes with the territory.

Celebrity obsession is a part of the culture-just check to see what the most popular search terms are on Google or watch Entertainment Tonight.

Still, it’s understandable that Jobs wants to be left alone to deal with his medical problems. I sympathize. He doesn’t have to say anything to anyone. But Apple Inc. might as well be “Jobs Inc.” to many people. As the head of a company that is almost synonymous with this name, he unfortunately has some disclosure obligations.

Dan Farber contributed to this report

The plea by India’s market regulator Securities and Exchanges Board of India (SEBI) to question Ramalinga Raju, the disgraced former chairman of Satyam Computer Services, was deferred to Monday by a court here Friday.

The police plea to extend the stay of Ramalinga Raju, his brother and Satyam’s former managing director Rama Raju and former chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani will be taken up in court later Friday.

SEBI officials want to follow up on Ramalinga Raju’s startling confession on Jan 7 that he had overstated the company’s financial position by Rs.70 billion ($1.43 billion).

After the Satyam fiasco, Wipro CEO Girish paranjpe has said that their company is not working in the line of Satyam. In an interview with Forbes.com, Parnjpe has cleared his company’s view.

In the reply of a question Paranjpe said the World Bank ban is “completely unfortunate” timing of the announcement and stressed that the company had not “done anything wrong at all.”

When asked about the backgrounder, Parnjpe replied “It goes back to when we listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000. As part of the prospectus, we said we would have a small percentage of shares made available under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Direct Share Purchase Program that allowed Wipro employees and some of its clients and stakeholders to apply for the issue.”

Paranjpe replied in another question that “There were restrictions on how many shares could be allotted [up to 10.0% of the entire 3.0 million share issue]. In the end, some 75,000 shares were issued under the program.” At the same time Parajpe said, that the company was not aware regarding the rules and regulations of World Bank at that time.