O'Reilly talks about the lessons learned by its foray into e-book publishing.

Many people, both inside and outside of the publishing and media industry, are skeptical about the potential of paid content on mobile phones, especially given the troubled history of e-books. I beg to differ. In December 2008, O'Reilly's "iPhone: The Missing Manual" was published as an iPhone app. Since its release, the app has outsold the printed book, which is a best seller in its own right. We're learning a lot from the experience. Here our some of the questions that we're starting to answer.

Was the iPhone app for the "Missing Manual" an anomaly? After all, iPhone owners are the most likely audience for the "Manual."

O'Reilly: Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. This was a best-selling author on a red-hot topic. We're gearing up to release about 20 more books as iPhone apps, but realistically we don't expect any of those to sell as well as this first one.

Is the iPhone the most convenient place to get content about problems you're trying to solve on a computer?

For many of our readers, a first or second pass through one of our programming books is mainly about orienting to the landscape and getting a sense of the platform and what's possible, not about solving a particular problem at hand. The iPhone is a perfectly suitable environment for that kind of reading.

Won't you make less money selling iPhone apps than books? The computer book market is the computer book market, period. It has a certain size, and that's it. If you convert that market into iPhone app buyers instead of book buyers, say good-bye to your publishing business.

It would be economically bad news to sell a $5 product to someone who would otherwise pay $50. But it's good to sell a $5 product to someone who would not otherwise be a customer (provided, of course, that the marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost). For Safari Books Online, for direct sales of our e-books and now for this (single) iPhone app, the data suggests that they have created growth without sacrificing print market share. For example, our market share for printed computer books sold at retail was 14% in 2004, and is now 16%. According to Nielsen Bookscan data, the print version of iPhone: The Missing Manual has sold nearly as many copies as the next two competing titles combined in the time period since the app version went on sale in December.

This data only goes back to mid-January, but the 90-, 30- and seven-day averages on Amazon sales rank for the printed book have been steadily improving, suggesting that sales of the iPhone app version are not cannibalizing print sales--and may even be helping them.

Warner Bros. is reaching into its film vaults so it can sell old movies on made-to-order DVDs, in a move it hopes will goose sales of a vital product in a downturn.

The initiative, which Warner claims is the first of its kind for a major studio, is an effort by the Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ) Inc. subsidiary to combat what could be a fundamental decline in demand for DVD purchases - a falloff that can be blamed on market saturation as much as the recession.

Walt Disney Co. (nyse: DIS - news - people ) CEO Bob Iger warned of this shift last month when he noted that most U.S. households own 80 DVDs already, leading people to become "more selective" about what discs they buy.

U.S. DVD spending fell 7 percent last year, to $21.6 billion, according to The Digital Entertainment Group, an industry consortium. While high-definition Blu-ray disc spending nearly tripled, it represented a small slice of the market, at $750 million.

Now retailers are cutting back shelf space for DVDs. And digital downloads have come nowhere near to making up the difference, said Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, who doesn't predict overall growth in home video until 2010.

Home video revenues are a key profit driver for the studios - in some cases, accounting for 60 percent more money than what a studio collects at the box office. So the recent decline has forced studios to do everything from lay off staff to pare back movie making.

Note: Most of these apps do, indeed, use less than 10MB of hard drive space when installed, or use that much when they're running in the background. Some will scale in use as you demand more or less from them—DisplayFusion or UltraMon, for example, when handling very high-resolution backgrounds or a wall of monitors—but all should have an almost negligible performance impact on a modern system.

10. Taskbar Shuffle

You don't open your programs in the order you want them neatly arranged on your taskbar, you open them when you need them. Taskbar Shuffle knows this, and makes it easy to quickly swap windows around, along with system tray icons. It also allows you to close out windows with a simple middle-click, which alone could make it worth the roughly 6MB price of admission. You won't know you wanted to fling windows out of your cursor's way until you try it.

9. Everything

It's probably smaller than your desktop wallpaper. But Everything is more useful and efficient than applications 25x its size. Everything only searches through file names, not inside the contents of them, but it does so stupid-fast as you type. You'll usually find your file with a few keystrokes, and Google fans will appreciate the boolean operators that enable and/or elegance. Definitely an app you'll want to right-click and create a keyboard shortcut for. There's also Locate32, which does a bit more, is portable, and has more user-friendly features—we just like Everything for its single box that searches, uh, everything.

DisplyFusion or 8. UltraMon

If you're rocking dual, triple, or even quadruple monitors at home or at the office (and, let us just say, lucky you on that last bit), these apps have a relatively small system footprint, but make a big impact in how your system looks. They both manage separate or split wallpapers across multiple monitors, and can grab and rotate images from your computer, Flickr, or other sources. With DisplayFusion's recent update, they also both maintain your Windows taskbar across all your monitors (or don't, if that's how you like it). Our resident multi-monitor enthusiast Jason still keeps both apps on his system for the little things, like multi-monitor screensavers in UltraMon, but both are among the very select paid apps we'll admit to being worth shelling out for (although both have restricted "free" versions as well).

7. Texter

I know, it's like we never give up on promoting this, right? Well, what can we say—we (the royal "we," really) wrote it because it filled a need in our half-breed lives of alternating text and HTML. Turns out, though, that folks ranging from power emailers to military writers have found dull, boring text they can automate, misspelled words to catch on the fly, or perhaps powerful, seriously secretive acronyms they'd occasionally like to spell out. For less than 2.5MB of RAM on most systems, this one packs a pretty hefty punch.

6. Revo Uninstaller

In a magical world without computer stress, we're all running virtual machines to try out software we might not want, and we simply uninstall it there, keeping one system nearly pristine. For the real world, Revo Uninstaller scrubs an application and all its traces off your Windows system. It can also turn off programs that are starting up with Windows, and uninstall applications with a crosshair "Hunter Mode" that doesn't require you to know what it's named.

5. NirSoft's password recovery tools

Nir Sofer has contributed a wealth of great applications to the Windows world, but his Lifetime Achievement award for free software could be granted on his password utilities alone. Need to share your network password, but haven't actually typed it in forever and a day? Network Password Recovery to the rescue. Need to unlock an Outlook PST file? Hit up PstPassword. Nir's got you covered for email clients, IM apps, and, for every other app in your system that you can only see asteriks for, Asterisk Logger. Use them with the light side of the geek Force, and you'll own Nir a beer after he saves your unlucky day.

4. CCleaner

With good reason, this tiny, powerful little app has remained our readers' favorite Windows maintenance tool. With a few clicks, it guns through your web browser remains, Recycle Bin, temporary system files, registry, and unnecessary application left-behinds, clearing them out and, in some cases, freeing up at least a DivX movie's worth of space. It also offers a startup program analyzer and disabling tool, and can be run on a schedule for that light, regular crap-free feeling (ew, but good, right?)

3. Process Explorer

Windows Task Manager isn't a bad tool, necessarily, but it only gives you a layman's view of what's eating up memory or pulling serious CPU cycles. Process Explorer expands on the vagueries of "rundll" or "svchost" with a double-click, links background services to applications, and points to the folders they come from. You might not need it all the time, but when you're rooting around and trying to free up system memory, it's like a finely-tuned metal detector.

2. Replacements for built-in Windows utilities

There are a lot of good reasons to keep on rockin' Windows XP, but some of the built-in utilities can feel a bit, well, dated—and that goes for a good number of Vista tools, tool. Notepads without tabs? A Paint app that can't really resize or undo more than one action? Skip the headaches and work-arounds and run down our list of power replacements for built-in Windows utilities, almost all of which are tiny litle buggers that do their work a whole lot better than Windows' own stuff. This editor, for instance, tries not to think about what file copying was like before TeraCopy came along—or, if he does, tries to keep himself calm about that 4GB transfer that failed out for no reason, overnight.

1. Rainlendar

If you feel like you've heard this one before without really knowing why, you probably saw it listed as the best calendar application, or listed as one of the tools used to create a Featured Desktop. This customizable little guy gives you a floating, tiny, yet informative calendar on your desktop, along with a to-do list. It integrates with Outlook, Google Calendar, and most other iCal-supporting scheduling systems. The full app with offline Outlook, GCal and shared calendar support costs €10 (or about $14-15), but could totally be worth the price for anyone who doesn't like to have to open a browser, or flip up Outlook, just to see what's going on Monday.

As we've learned from reading our comments over many years (collectively, at least), any Windows power-user has their own stash of little helpers that can move the rock down the road. Which teensy-weensy little apps get past the velvet rope to your system tray, or into your must-install list? Share your links and the reasons why they win in the comments.

Giz Explains: How Cell Towers Work

I recently visited a cell site shared by Clearwire and two other unnamed carriers—without frying my nuts. We've all driven past them so many times, but have you ever actually wondered how they work?

How They Work
Whether it's handling simple phone calls or 12Mbps WiMax data, cell sites are organized with more or less the same flow:

• A cellphone or modem radios the nearest towers, saying, basically, "I'm here!" When you make a call or logon, your phone then sends a message via radio that's picked up by the antenna array.

• A wire or fiberoptic line carries the call down to the wireless access point, connected to a multi-port switch.

• The call, along with many others, gets routed to a backhaul, usually down to an underground wired T1 or T3 line, but sometimes back up the mast to a powerful line-of-sight wireless microwave antenna. They resort to wireless either when they don't have a ground connection, or when the ground connection sucks.

• The incoming call or data comes back from the backhaul and up through the switch to the antenna, where it then hits your phone wirelessly, presuming your phone is still communicating with the same site. If you are moving, then there's a handoff—a new but more or less identical cell site transmits the data to your phone, once your phone checks in and says "I'm here."

All of this happens in the blink of an eye.

The Gear
Clearwire, who gave me the tour of the cell site during my WiMax test run, is a new company, only just now deploying their network, one that is only focused on data, and not on voice calls. This means they don't have a bunch of sites already established like other carriers (though their recent acquisition by Sprint may change this). But it also means their cellular gear is modern and compact compared to the others.

For instance, the carrier whose name probably starts with A keeps its gear in a bunker like the Endor moon one that Han Solo & Co. were trying to bust into in Jedi. The backup batteries must be enormous, because there's a sign on the door that says, "Danger - Corrosive Liquids - Wear Protective Equipment."

Clearwire, by comparison, has a high-school locker for its gear—one that is built somewhere else and just trucked to the location. You attach it to the on-site power, run lines and antennas up the mast, and either bolt the sucker to a cement foundation or to the side of a steel post, and voila, you are done. It uses two car batteries for its backup power—enough juice to last six hours and they don't have to wear a hazmat suit to service it. (It can also run off of a portable generator.)

In this particular site, the carrier whose name may start with a V had a set of three larger lockers, not the huge bunker that its competitor had, but a serious array nonetheless. As you probably guessed, each carrier locks up its own facility, so I wasn't at liberty to fully inspect the other guys' gear—or even confirm their identities.

Clearwire also runs skinny fiberoptics up to the top of the tower, instead of the thick insulated copper cables that the old boys' networks run. Again, this has more to do with newness than simple common sense, but it may mean cell towers could be a little slimmer in the future.

So what happens up top?
The real demystification was the antenna array itself. I for one did not know a lot about how things were set up, and now I know a tiny bit more, which I will share:

• The huge antenna masts can have multiple carriers, each with its own triangular platform and antenna array.

• The reason the platforms are triangular is so the 360-degree coverage can be split into 120-degree pie pieces, which—if you look closely—can be subdivided again into 40-degree slices for increased, pinpointed coverage.

• If there's a white disk-shaped antenna among the array, it means that the carrier has a line-of-sight microwave backhaul. Clearwire's can handle 80Mbps at the moment, but must be directly in line with another microwave antenna. (Speaking of fried nuts, I wouldn't want to stand between two of those.)

Don't forget to read our exclusive uncapped WiMax road test—featuring blistering wireless speeds!

While experts know how the outbreak began, they aren't much closer to stopping future ones. The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees 80% of the nation's food supply, a $466 billion business, inspects roughly 5% of the nation's 150,000 food processing plants. 

The limited oversight has been a problem of expense. Inspecting each of the domestic food companies the FDA regulates would cost $524 million, according to a report issued last year by the Government Accountability Office. By comparison, the agency received $662 million in 2008 to fund all food safety efforts.

In Depth: Eight Food Safety Basics

President Obama has allocated an additional $1 billion to boost such efforts. On Saturday he said the agency's new priorities would include modernizing labs and increasing the number of food inspectors. A newly created Food Safety Working Group will also develop specific recommendations on regulatory issues.

It's a promising start, yet no reassurance for Americans worried about unexpectedly falling ill. But consumers have more power than they might realize, says Shelley Feist, executive director of the nonprofit organization Partnership for Food Safety Education.

Of the estimated 76 million cases of foodborne disease that occur each year, only a small fraction are due to widespread outbreaks. Poor food handling practices are responsible for the majority of cases. The good news is that common errors like cross-contamination and insufficient heat and refrigeration can be remedied easily with consistent habits.

"Consumers see things like the peanut butter outbreak and feel like it's out of their control," says Feist. In reality, your food is often as safe as your preparation practices.

Food Safety Basics
There are four cardinal principles of food safety: clean, separate, cook and chill. In other words, wash with soap and water anything that comes into contact with food, including hands, utensils and cutting boards.

Then be sure to separate raw meat and seafood from produce and cooked ingredients. Temperature is very important to preparing food safely. Meat, poultry and seafood each have optimal temperatures at which they should be cooked to effectively kill pathogens.

It's also crucial to refrigerate food appropriately. This means defrosting frozen items in a microwave or refrigerator instead of on a countertop since pathogens are more likely to breed at room temperature. Never let food sit out in the open for longer than two hours. 

Those preparing food should be particularly careful when feeding the young and elderly, populations that may have compromised immune systems and are often more susceptible to foodborne pathogens.

Such guidelines seem obvious, but Feist says consumers tend to be erratic in their practices. People also often blame what they ate earlier that day, not realizing that diseases can take several days or weeks to manifest. If lunch or dinner came from the nearest take-out joint, it can be easy to overlook your own poor food handling practices.

The Truth About Outbreaks
Of course, even the best practices may not matter if ingredients are already tainted. And it’s important to remember that the nation's sprawling food system regularly sends one item into thousands of products, meaning that outbreaks aren't limited to a single crop or animal. For example, the improperly roasted peanuts responsible for the latest outbreak were included in peanut butter, paste and meal. These ingredients ended up in everything from cookies to ice cream to candy. By mid-March, nearly 3,500 products had been recalled by the FDA.

Outbreaks are also notoriously difficult to track, says Kirk Smith, supervisor of foodborne diseases at the Minnesota Department of Health. Victims must visit a doctor, who then has to properly diagnose the problem and take a stool sample, which is sent to county or state labs for analysis. If diseases like salmonella or E. coli are confirmed, health officials interview victims, whose memories of their diet at the time are often foggy.

Smith also says that for every case of salmonella that's confirmed, there are 38 more that go unnoticed. And while Minnesota's Department of Health receives about $1 million annually to investigate possible outbreaks, many states work with far less resources.

In sum, it is almost impossible for consumers to know if an outbreak is happening in their community until it is identified by officials, and that often depends on the level of funding programs receive.

There is hope that President Obama's plan will significantly improve food safety. John Sheehan, director of the office of plant and dairy foods at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, says that despite recent setbacks, the agency is working to identify "lessons learned".

"Although the [peanut butter] foodborne illness outbreak underscores the challenges FDA faces," says Sheehan, "the American food supply continues to be among the safest in the world, if not the safest."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama vowed Saturday to stick to the big-ticket items in his budget proposal but acknowledged that dollar amounts would "undoubtedly change" as Congress prepared to take up his record spending plan.

Trying to refocus attention from the AIG (nyse: AIG - news - people ) bonus scandal that has drawn public outrage, Obama stepped up defense of his $3.55 trillion budget for fiscal 2010, a linchpin of his efforts to rescue the ailing economy from the worst crisis in decades.

"It's an economic blueprint for our future, a vision of America where growth is not based on real estate bubbles or over-leveraged banks, but on a firm foundation of investments in energy, education and health care that will lead to a real and lasting prosperity," Obama said in his weekly radio address.

The budget committees of the Senate and House were set to begin crafting their budget legislation next week.

Republicans and even some of Obama's fellow Democrats who control Congress have complained that his budget, the first of his presidency, is too costly. It projects deficits of $1.75 trillion this fiscal year and $1.17 trillion next fiscal year.

Congressional budget experts Friday offered a darker economic and budget outlook, projecting a $1.8 trillion deficit this year which could complicate Obama's efforts to win passage of his 2010 budget.

Taking on his critics, Obama said: "These investments are not a wish list of priorities that I picked out of thin air.

"They are a central part of a comprehensive strategy to grow this economy by attacking the very problems that have dragged it down for too long: the high cost of health care and our dependence on foreign oil, our education deficit and our fiscal deficit."

Reminding listeners that he had inherited a "fiscal mess" from his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, Obama -- who took office on Jan. 20 -- reiterated his pledge to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his term.

But he acknowledged room for compromise on a final budget deal. "As the House and the Senate take up this budget next week, the specific details and dollar amounts in this budget will undoubtedly change," Obama said. "That's a normal and healthy part of the process.

He urged lawmakers to act with a sense of urgency, saying "the challenges we face are too large to ignore." (Editing by Chris Wilson)

Connecticut's attorney general says documents turned over to his office by American International Group Inc. shows the company paid out $218 million in bonuses, higher than the $165 million previously disclosed.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's office received the documents late Friday after issuing a subpoena.

Blumenthal says the documents show that 73 people received at least $1 million apiece, and five of those got bonuses of more than $4 million. The financially ailing insurance giant has been under fire for giving bonuses after receiving more than $182.5 billion in federal bailout money.

AIG (nyse: AIG - news - people ) spokesman Mark Herr declined to comment Saturday.

Blumenthal said the newly revealed number will "further fuel the justified anger and revulsion that people feel."

"Very aggressive policy."

Over dinner on Tuesday night, that's what New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini told me was required for a "U" shaped economic recovery "rather than a Japanese-like 'L' into oblivion. He puts the odds of a "U" at two-thirds and an "L" at only one-third, if these further policy actions take place. Such a voluble bear coming down in favor of a "U" should be welcome news to the crushed investment community.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke must have been eavesdropping on our conversation. The very next day, Bernanke did promulgate some "very aggressive action" indeed--another trillion dollars or so to be poured into the mortgage-backed and Treasury securities in a bold attempt to free the credit markets. Wall Street loved Bernanke's move, extending the stock market gains here and abroad and driving interest rates on Treasury securities and mortgage-backed bonds lower. Hope alights again for housing as mortgage interest rates have been driven down to 4.79%, which should help to thin the gargantuan inventory of unsold homes.

Biogen and DirecTv are two "Focus List" buys from Dow Theory Forecasts. Click here for more, along with regular portfolio adjustments from Dow Theory Forecasts.

Now it is time for Aggressive Action II from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. It must be a decisive and clear creation of a "good bank/bad bank" arrangement to get rid of the albatross around the necks of Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), Wells Fargo (nyse: WFC - news - people ), JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) and Bank of America (nyse: BAC - news - people ), for starters.

Roubini believes it is crucial to break up the big banks into three or four parts each, so that they can be better managed. "If you're too big to fail," he says, "then you're too big, period." If Geithner comes through with a clear, aggressive, bold and easy-to-understand program for the banks, his star will rise, and so will the bank share-led rally in this bear market. All eyes are on Uncle Sam.

There is a wonderful precedent of how a "good bank/bad bank" solution can rebuild debilitated capital structures in financial institutions. In 1988, John Vogelstein, a brilliant partner at E.M. Warburg Pincus & Co., together with Wachtell Lipton law partner Martin Lipton, was able to restore stability to Mellon Bank and make a profit of $1 billion by separating the terrible assets from the promising ones. It was the first non-assisted recapitalization of a major commercial bank, and out of it grew one of the nation's top 25 bank holding companies. Mellon's bad assets were put into a bad bank at a discount of 25% to 30%, and over an extended period of time, the stream of income net of interest from these assets brought exactly the value that Vogelstein had predicted. Warburg Pincus made $1 billion on its 20% interest from a bank that was losing $300 million on a balance sheet of only $750 million.

Mr. Geithner, please note that Mr. Vogelstein is still affiliated with Warburg Pincus and can be reached at (212) 878-0601.

CBSSports.com’s Jason Kint told us the online numbers were well ahead of last year and now CBS has released the internal stats to back that up: NCAA March Madness On Demand drew more than 2.7 million unique users during the first day of the men’s basketball tournament, up 56% over the 1.75 million that showed up for tip-off last year.

As you would expect, the amount of live streaming audio and video rose as well, up 65% to 2.8 million hours from 1.7 million.

Even the “Boss Button ”—this year a spreadsheet-like ad from Comcast (nasdaq: CMCSA - news - people )—drew 1.5 million clicks. CBSSports.com didn’t break out the amount of audio and video.

In addition to third-party partners including Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people )'s YouTube, Comcast, Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people )'s MSN and Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people )'s AOL/Bebo, CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ) Interactive has gone all out with marketing across 18 of its own sites. Stopping by CNETNews.com this morning for a news story brought up a large interstitial promo; CNET even did a how to watch March Madness video. CBS Sports and CBS Radio are promoting on the air.

—iPhone: The MMOD app is the number one paid app in the iPhone app store but CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ) is not releasing any sales numbers.

The $4.99 app allows iPhone and iTouch users with WiFi access to watch any of the 63 games live or on demand; those connecting through AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) on 3G can only get live streaming audio.

Japan's Sony knew when to call time on Sony BMG, its joint-venture record label with Bertelsmann, when last year it took full control of the unprofitable entity. Although the mobile-phone industry is not in as bad a shape as the music industry, Sony would do well to buy out its mobile-phone partner Ericsson also.

On Friday, their Sony Ericsson partnership warned of yet another quarterly loss, in the range of $475.6 to $543.6 million, on the back of some pretty dismal quarterly unit sales. Given that there is not much technological rationale for network-supplier Ericsson to stick with its consumer-electronics pal Sony, and even fewer financial benefits, it might be better for the company if the two went their separate ways.

Having full control of the company would allow Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) much greater leverage of its brand, according to Nicolas van Stackelberg, an analyst with Sal. Oppenheim. He told Forbes that even though Sony Ericsson already used Sony's Walkman brand to promote music phones, as well as its Cybershot digital-camera brand, a third step might be to use the Playstation name to promote mobile gaming.

The joint venture's profit warning socked shares of Ericsson (nasdaq: ERIC - news - people ), down 9.0%, to 69.00 Swedish kronor ($8.45), in Stockholm, and didn't spare rival Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) either. Shares of the Finnish mobile-phone champion ended the day flat, at 8.35 euros ($11.32), after recovering from a midday sell-off.

"You have to suspect that Nokia will have very, very poor volumes this quarter too," said Lars Soderfjell, an analyst with Kaupthing. "We don't know how much is Sony Ericsson-specific, and how much is the market, but Nokia won't get the benefit of the doubt from investors."

Sony Ericsson said quarterly unit shipments were expected to fall to 14.0 million phones, a 36.4% drop over the year. The company is on track to hit its target of 2,000 job cuts and an initial 300.0 million euros ($408.1 million) in cost savings by the second half of this year.

A divorce might take some time to work out, however, given that Ericsson won't want to give up its 50.0% stake at fire-sale prices in a rapidly deteriorating market. Sony Ericsson's expected quarterly loss would be the third in a row, and the company is burning cash at an alarming rate -- a capital injection from both parents may be a necessary prelude to any divestment on more reasonable terms.

A spokeswoman for Sony Ericsson told Forbes that both Sony and Ericsson had reiterated their commitment to the joint venture on Friday, and that both saw it as "a strategic pillar" of the business. "That includes sufficient funding, if necessary," she added.