Guess what? Vine videos are longer than six seconds

It turns out that Vines are actually 6.5 seconds long, not six.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

Among the many curiosities about Twitter's Vine app has been how the company decided six seconds was the magic number for a clip's length.

Well, guess what? It turns out that the maximum length of a Vine isn't six seconds at all. In fact, they top out at 6.5 seconds.

And how do we know? After watching a Vine today that was tweeted by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, I came away with the feeling that it felt longer than advertised. A bit of quick work using iShowU by CNET videographer Jared Kohler then proved that a Vine works out to six seconds and 14 frames, played at 28.77 frames per second. In other words, almost exactly 6.5 seconds. Don't believe it? Grab a stopwatch and time the Vine below.

What does that mean? Well, it means you're actually getting 8.3 percent more video than you thought you were. And that's a good thing, right?

But the fact that the videos are really 6.5 seconds long does make one wonder why that's the length. At the time of Vine's launch last month, Twitter explained that the six-second limit was a choice made after lots of testing. "The team tested various video lengths, ranging from about four seconds to ten seconds, as they were building Vine," a Twitter spokesperson told CNET at the time. "They found that six seconds was the ideal length, from both the production and consumption side."

Aha! But then why is the real number 6.5 seconds? Is that extra half-second crucial for production and/or consumption? It's hard to say because Twitter didn't respond to a new request for comment. And because, let's be honest, an extra half a second isn't all that big a deal.

Still, if the folks at Vine were making an arbitrary decision about length, then why did they actually settle on 6.5 seconds instead of six? We'd love your thoughts -- even those that make fun of us for caring about small details like this. Please leave them in the comments section.

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Severed Heads Were Sacrifices in Ancient Mexico

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of more than 150 skulls from an ancient shrine in central Mexico—evidence of one of the largest mass sacrifices of humans in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The skulls, many facing east, lay beneath a crude, slightly elevated mound of crushed stone on what was once an artificial island in a vast shallow lake, now completely dry.

"The site is barely a bump on the horizon in the middle of nowhere," said lead archaeologist Christopher Morehart, of Georgia State University. And that was baffling. Previous evidence of such sacrifices came from grand pyramids in large ceremonial centers.

The discovery suggests that the site—near the town of Xaltocan (named after the ancient lake)—played a significant role in the political turmoil during the period between the years 650 and 800. The great city of Teotihuacan, only nine miles (15 kilometers) away, had suddenly begun to collapse, and the power it once exerted over the region was slipping away. Many experts believe this turn of events was triggered by a massive drought.

What followed was a time of  "political, cultural, and demographic change," according to Morehart, a National Geographic research grantee. As people left Teotihuacan and moved to the surrounding areas, new communities formed and new leaders competed for power. "There's a good chance that the sacrifices are related to these competitions," Morehart said.

The sacrificed individuals could even have been war captives—often the case in Mesoamerican cultures. The site itself was probably not a battlefield, though. It was a sacred space that was specially prepared for rituals.

The people who lived in this area appear to have performed elaborately choreographed rituals at the shrine before the fall of Teotihuacan, but they didn't include human sacrifice. Because of its water-bound location and the presence of freshwater springs nearby, the shrine was likely the site of ceremonies that petitioned gods associated with rain and fertility. Artifacts uncovered include clay images of Tlaloc, a rain god.

The rituals began to include sacrifices, though, as power struggles gripped the parched region. Morehart and his colleagues from the National University of Mexico believe that victims were first killed and dismembered. The body parts may then have been thrown into the lake, while the heads were carefully arranged and buried. Incense was burned during this ceremony, along with the resinous wood of pine trees. Flowers added their own perfume to the fragrant smoke, and foods such as ritually burned maize were presented as additional offerings.

Over the following centuries, new peoples arrived in the area and political power ebbed and shifted, yet the sacred nature of the site persisted. Morehart and his team found evidence for rituals here during both the Aztec and colonial periods, and they even came across a recent offering.

"As we were digging we found a black plastic bag. Inside was a hardboiled egg, a black candle, and some photos of people," he said. "It's a fascinating example of continued ritual activity in a place despite dramatic changes in social, political, and cultural contexts."

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Alleged Cop-Killer Has Calif. Region on Edge

Police officers across Southern California are on the defensive and scaling back their public exposure today, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outside police stations as former-cop-turned-alleged-gunman Christopher Dorner, armed and apparently on the hunt for cops, remains at large.

Dorner is suspected of killing one cop and two civilians during a rampage that began Sunday, injuring two other officers along the way.

Police departments have stationed officers in tactical gear outside police departments, stopped answering low-level calls and pulled motorcycle patrols off the road in order to protect officers who might be a target of Dorner's alleged rampage.

"The person we suspect of doing this is mobile, and with California's interstate highway system, every hour that goes by that's another 60 or 70 or 80 miles or greater circumference, it is a very wide net," Chief of Police Sergio Diaz of the Riverside police department said.

"We've made certain modifications of our deployments, our deviations today and I want to leave it at that, and also to our responses. We are concentrating on calls for service that are of a high priority, threats to public safety, we're not going to go on barking dog calls today," Diaz said.

Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the Los Angeles police department said Dorner is "believed to be armed and extremely dangerous."

Police have also put Dorner's license plate number and car description on highway signs, although they warn Dorner might have changed his license plate.

A former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, Dorner released an online manifesto before the shooting saying that he was targeting law enforcement and would be hard to capture because of his knowledge of police tactics.

The Los Angeles police department has sent dozens of patrols to guard specific targets named in Dorner's manifesto, which cops say he posted online.

Dorner wrote a long letter posted to his Facebook page in which he explained that he had been wrongly fired from the Los Angeles police department and would take revenge on those that wronged him.

The fired California cop went to a yacht club near San Diego overnight where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.

He aborted the attempted theft when the boat's propeller became entangled in a rope, law enforcement officials said. It was at that point he is believed to have headed to Riverside, where he allegedly shot two police officers.

"He pointed a handgun at the victim [at the yacht club] and demanded the boat," Lt. David Rohowits of the San Diego Police Department said.

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Police say the rifle marksman shot at four officers in two incidents overnight, hitting three of them: one in Corona, Calif., and the two in Riverside, Calif.

Lopez said two LAPD officers were in Corona on special detail to check on one of the individuals named in Dorner's manifesto and encountered Dorner. Dorner allegedly grazed one of them but missed the other.

"[This is an] extremely tense situation," Lopez said. "We call this a manhunt. We approach it cautiously because of the propensity of what has already happened."

After Dorner allegedly shot at LAPD officers in Corona, he fled and encountered two Riverside police officers stopped at a red light in their police car. Dorner used a rifle to shoot through their windshield, killing one officer and injuring the other.

The deceased officer was a 34-year-old, 11-year veteran of the police department. The injured officer, age 27, is expected to make a full recovery.

Diaz said that the names of the officers are being withheld to protect their families, who might be targeted by Dorner if the names are released.

"They were on routine patrol stopped at a stop light when they were ambushed," Lt. Guy Toussant of the Riverside police department said.

In the manifesto Dorner published online, he threatened at least 12 people by name, along with their families.

"Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family," Dorner wrote in his manifesto.

A badge and identification belonging to Dorner have been found in San Diego, according to San Diego police Sgt. Ray Battrick. Dorner's LAPD badge and ID were found by someone near the city's airport, and turned in to police overnight, The Associated Press reported.

Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck said today that 40 protective details have been deployed to protect officers and their families.

"We are taking all measures possible to ensure safety of our officers and their families," he said.

Dorner is also believed to be responsible for the weekend slayings of an assistant women's college basketball coach and her fiancé in what cops believe are acts of revenge against the LAPD, as suggested in his online manifesto.

Lawrence was found slumped behind the wheel of his white Kia in the parking lot of their upscale apartment complex in Irvine Sunday and Quan was in the passenger seat.

"A particular interest at this point in the investigation is a multi-page manifesto in which the suspect has implicated himself in the slayings," Maggard said.

Police said Dorner's manifesto included threats against members of the LAPD. Police say they are taking extra measures to ensure the safety of officers and their families.

The document, allegedly posted on an Internet message board this week, apparently blames Quan's father, retired LAPD Capt. Randy Quan, for his firing from the department.

One passage from the manifesto reads, "I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty."

"I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own," it reads. "I'm terminating yours."

Dorner was with the department from 2005 until 2008, when he was fired for making false statements.

Randy Quan, who became a lawyer in retirement, represented Dorner in front of the Board of Rights, a tribunal that ruled against Dorner at the time of his dismissal, LAPD Capt. William Hayes told The Associated Press Wednesday night.

According to documents from a court of appeals hearing in October 2011, Dorner was fired from the LAPD after he made a complaint against his field-training officer, saying in the course of an arrest she had kicked a suspect who was a schizophrenic with severe dementia.

After an investigation, Dorner was fired for making false statements.

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review

A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the data

Universal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis

A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic resistance

Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air

As pollution levels return to normal in China's capital after a record-breaking month of smog, what can be done to banish the smog?

Genes mix across borders more easily than folk tales

Analysing variations in folk tales using genetic techniques shows that people swap genes more readily than stories, giving clues to how cultures evolve

Sleep and dreaming: Slumber at the flick of a switch

Wouldn't it be wonderful to pack a good night's sleep into fewer hours? Technology has the answer - and it could treat depression and even extend our lives too

Closest Earth-like planet may be 13 light years away

A habitable exoplanet should be near enough for future telescopes to probe its atmosphere for signs of life

Lifelogging captures a real picture of your health

How can lifelogging - wearing a camera round your neck to record your every move - reveal what's healthy and unhealthy in the way we live?

Musical brains smash audio algorithm limits

The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have broken a limit on sound perception imposed by the Fourier transform

Magnitude 8 earthquake strikes Solomon Islands

A major earthquake has caused a small tsunami in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least five people

Nuclear knock-backs on UK's new reactors and old waste

Plans to build new reactors in the UK are stalling as yet another company pulls out, and there is still nowhere to store nuclear waste permanently

Amateur astronomer helps Hubble snap galactic monster

An amateur astronomer combined his pictures with images from the Hubble archive to reveal the true nature of galactic oddball M106

Nightmare images show how lack of sleep kills

Fatigue has been blamed for some of worst human-made disasters of recent decades. Find out more in our image gallery

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Euro slips ahead of ECB meeting

NEW YORK: The euro slipped against the US dollar on Wednesday ahead of the European Central Bank's policy meeting, expected to keep monetary policy on hold.

Meanwhile, the Japanese currency pulled higher after hitting three-year lows on Tuesday.

The euro fell to $1.3519 at 2200 GMT, from $1.3582 late Tuesday, nearly two cents below its 14-month high of $1.3710 hit on Friday.

The slip came a day before ECB policymakers were to meet, with most analysts saying they will not undertake any more easing of monetary conditions despite worries about slow growth and the strengthening euro.

On Tuesday French President Francois Hollande urged a more managed euro, saying it should not be allowed to "fluctuate depending on the markets' mood."

"A single currency zone must have a foreign exchange policy, otherwise it will see an exchange rate imposed on it (by the markets) which is out of line with its real competitive position," he told the European parliament.

Also weighing on the euro was concerns about political instability in Spain, where the government is under attack over corruption allegations, and Italy, where former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, much distrusted by markets and Europe's technocrats, was gaining in election polls.

"There is enough uncertainty around Spanish and Italian politics to ensure that the next leg higher for the euro is delayed," said Kit Juckes of Societe Generale.

Hollande's plea came amid increased worries from around the world over a global currency war.

A key target of those worries, the Japanese yen, pulled higher on Wednesday a day after hitting three-year lows.

The yen sagged further on Tuesday following the announcement by Bank of Japan chief Masaaki Shirakawa that he would step down three weeks before his term ends, after butting heads with the new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe over monetary policy.

Abe wants the central bank to undertake more easing to reinflate the slumping economy.

But the yen edged higher Wednesday, with a dollar buying 93.57 yen, compared with 93.61 yen a day earlier.

The euro slipped to 126.46 yen from 127.13 yen.

The British pound was virtually unchanged at $1.5658; the dollar rose to 0.9101 Swiss francs from 0.9077 francs.

- AFP/de

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Microsoft hits Reddit to address Surface Pro concerns

Microsoft's Surface Pro has come under a lot of scrutiny in reviews over the last 24 hours. Microsoft tried to address some of the issues that have been brought up.

(Credit:
Brooke Crothers)

Microsoft addressed Surface Pro issues with disk space and battery life, among other topics, in a Reddit AMA today.

The discussion was led by Panos Panay, head of the Surface team at Microsoft. He provided relatively lengthy responses to two issues that have emerged as shortcomings with the company's newest
tablet-laptop hybrid that runs
Windows 8 Pro (and is scheduled to go on sale Saturday).

What follows are some excerpts from Panay's as well as other team members' responses.

Battery life: "If you compare it to say a MacBook Air, you will quickly see that pound for pound in battery size vs. battery life, you will find optimizations that put Surface best in its class. That said, we picked a smaller battery to be sure we were able to give you the same performance and to keep it thin. This kept the weight under 2 lbs.... While these trade-offs are challenges as much as they are opportunities, we think given the performance and experience you will be getting, it is an exciting product.

And Panay addressed disk space, saying that Microsoft has freed up an additional 7GB to 8GB for users.

Storage Space and Pro 64GB model: We designed Surface Pro (and the allocation of disk space on our systems) to have the power of full Windows 8, the ability to have a simplified and fast upgrade to full Office, and the confidence of a recovery image already available on your device.... Initial reports out regarding available disk space were conservative (e.g., 23GB available on 64GB and 83GB available on the 128GB system), however our final production units are coming in with ~6-7GB additional free space.

Available disk space is a design choice and a tough one to make as an engineering team.... There have also been questions about why [Microsoft decided to include] the recovery image by default. Ideally, you will never need your recovery image, however this is a choice we would prefer the customer to make vs. having the customer need the recovery image not realizing they needed to create one themselves.

We decided to ship a Pro 64GB sku as it provides full Windows 8 and enough storage for a number of large application installs such as games, productivity apps, etc. which usually run in the multiple GBs.

And there were questions about display size scaling. In particular, one participant was concerned about Surface Pro's high resolution (1,920x1,080) being scaled to 150 percent on the desktop.

"I want to keep scaling at 150% on the Surface Pro, and have scaling on my external display at 100%. Are there plans to fix this in Windows 8?"

And the Surface team responded.

The Windows team is aggressively working on this feature to fix this for all high resolution Windows devices. We don't have a date yet to share, so sorry.

And the Surface team addressed Wi-Fi issues too.

Wi-Fi connection robustness has been improved with the Feb. 12 Windows Update. Another version is in the works and will release March 12.

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Confirmed: Couch Potatoes Have Lower Sperm Counts

Men, here's another reason to work up a sweat: It boosts your sperm count.

According to new research, couch potatoes who watch lots of TV have fewer sperm than men who exercise moderately or vigorously each week.

Sperm count is a measure of semen quality, which has mysteriously declined in U.S. men in recent decades. Low sperm count is linked to infertility as well as testicular cancer, prostate cancer, and cardiovascular problems later in life.

(Related: "Deep-Voiced Men Have Lower Sperm Counts, Study Says.")

That's why scientists have been searching for ways that men can improve their sperm—including changing daily behaviors.

"We know little about how lifestyle may impact semen quality," said study leader Audrey Jane Gaskins, a doctoral student in nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Her discovery that two changeable behaviors—exercise and TV watching—"could have a big impact on sperm count is pretty exciting," she said.

"Impressive" Sperm Finds

For the study, Gaskins and colleagues asked 189 young men, mostly college students from the University of Rochester in New York, to fill out questionnaires on their physical activity, diet, stress, and other lifestyle factors.

Each man then provided a semen sample in a medical clinic. (See "Sperm Recognize 'Brothers,' Team Up for Speed.")

The results showed that the men who reported exercising more than 15 hours a week had 73 percent higher sperm counts than men who exercised fewer than 5 hours a week. And men who watched more than 20 hours of TV had 44 percent lower sperm counts than men who watched little to no TV.

These are "pretty impressive differences," said Gaskins, whose study appeared February 4 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The team also ruled out smoking and being overweight—two clinical causes of low sperm counts—as contributing factors among participants in its study.

Why couch potatoes produce less sperm is unknown, although there are two theories, Gaskins said. One is that exercise produces more antioxidant enzymes that can prevent a natural process called oxidative stress from damaging cell membranes in the body. This damage can disrupt the creation of new sperm cells. (Find out how a man produces 1,500 sperm a second.)

The other reason is somewhat controversial: That when men watch TV, their scrotums get squished against their bodies, making that region hotter and possibly preventing new sperm from being made.

Some research has shown that sperm production slows if the scrotum temperature rises 1.8 to 3.6ºF (1 to 2ºC) above normal body temperature, Gaskins said. But other studies have also shown that warmer scrotums have no bearing on sperm creation.

Get Moving, Men

But the study also raises some more questions about sperm count, experts noted.

Oddly, the sedentary subjects' sperm didn't show any changes in their physical structures or in how well they swam—two soft indicators of sperm health, noted Phillip Mucksavage, a urologist at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia who was not involved in the study. (See "Sperm Tracked in 3-D-A First.")

Though there are fewer of them, "the sperm that are there still look good."

Mucksavage added that the study's results would have been stronger if the scientists had found other sedentary activities—such as sitting at a computer or reading a book—had the same affect on sperm count as did watching TV.

What's more, said T. Mike Hsieh, a urologist at the University of California, San Diego, the study doesn't have any implications for fertility, one of the main reasons men are concerned about sperm count.

That's because one semen sample is not enough to determine fertility. That requires a more thorough analysis, including multiple semen samples and blood work, said Hsieh, who wasn't involved in the study.

It's not like if you "stop watching TV you'd go from infertile to fertile," he said.

But all the experts agreed on one thing: you should get active if you aren't already.

Said Hsieh: "I would use this as a piece of evidence to motivate my patients to get off the couch and start working out."

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Galaxy May Be Full of 'Second Earths'

You may look out on a starry night and get a lonely feeling, but astronomers now say our Milky Way galaxy may be thick with planets much like Earth -- perhaps 4.5 billion of them, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers looked at data from NASA's Kepler space telescope in orbit, and conclude that 6 percent of the red dwarf stars in the Milky Way probably have Earth-like, habitable planets. That's a lot by space standards, and since red dwarfs are very common -- they make up three out of four stars in our part of the galaxy -- we may have a lot more neighbors than we thought.

The nearest of them, astronomers said today, could be 13 light-years away -- not exactly commuting distance, since a light-year is six trillion miles, but a lot closer than most yellow stars like Earth's sun.

Video: Are We Alone? Kepler's Mission

David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

"We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted," said Courtney Dressing, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, in announcing the findings today. The results will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

David Charbonneau, a co-author, said, "We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy. That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought."

Red dwarfs are older, smaller and dimmer than our sun, but a planet orbiting close to one could be sufficiently warmed to have liquid water. Dressing and her colleagues cited three possible planets that were spotted by Kepler, which was launched in 2009. One is 90 percent as large as Earth, and orbits its red sun in just 20 of our days.

There is no saying what such a world would actually be like; the Kepler probe can only show whether distant stars have objects periodically passing in front of them. But based on that, scientists can do some math and estimate the mass and orbit of these possible planets. So far, Kepler has spotted more than 2,700 of them in the small patch of sky it has been watching.

There are estimated to be 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way -- which is probably a pretty average galaxy. So the new estimate implies a universe with tremendous numbers of Earth-like planets, far beyond our ability to count.

Pictures: Final Frontier: Images From the Distant Universe

Could they be friendly to life? There's no way to know yet, but space scientists say that if you have the right ingredients -- a planet the right size, temperatures that allow for liquid water, organic molecules and so forth -- and the chances may be good, even on a planet that is very different from ours.

"You don't need an Earth clone to have life," said Dressing.

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Today on New Scientist: 5 February 2013

Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere

A new generation of lenses could bring us better lighting, anti-forgery technology and novel movie projectors

Baby boomers' health worse than their parents

Americans who were born in the wake of the second world war have poorer health than the previous generation at the same age

New 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime

A distributed computing project called GIMPS has found a record-breaking prime number, the first for four years

Cellular signals used to make national rainfall map

The slight weakening of microwave signals caused by reflections off raindrops can be exploited to keep tabs on precipitation

NASA spy telescopes won't be looking at Earth

A Mars orbiter and an exoplanet photographer are among proposals being presented today for how to use two second-hand spy satellites that NASA's been given

China gets the blame for media hacking spree

The big US newspapers and Twitter all revealed last week that they were hacked - and many were quick to blame China. But where's the proof?

Nobel-winning US energy secretary steps down

Steven Chu laid the groundwork for government-backed renewable energy projects - his successor must make a better case for them

Sleep and dreaming: Where do our minds go at night?

We are beginning to understand how our brains shape our dreams, and why they contain such an eerie mixture of the familiar and the bizarre

Beating heart of a quantum time machine exposed

This super-accurate timekeeper is an optical atomic clock and its tick is governed by a single ion of the element strontium

A life spent fighting fair about the roots of violence

Despite the fierce conflicts experienced living among anthropologists, science steals the show in Napoleon Chagnon's autobiography Noble Savages

Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source

Science may lean to the left, but that's no reason to give progressives who reject it a "free pass"

Need an organ? Just print some stem cells in 3D

Printing blobs of human embryonic stem cells could allow us to grow organs without scaffolds

Ice-age art hints at birth of modern mind

An exhibition of ice-age art at London's British Museum shows astonishing and enigmatic creativity

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Dell unveils private equity buyout worth US$24.4b

NEW YORK: Dell unveiled plans to go private Tuesday in a $24.4 billion deal giving founder Michael Dell a chance to reshape the former number one PC maker away from the spotlight of Wall Street.

"I believe this transaction will open an exciting new chapter for Dell, our customers and team members," Michael Dell said in unveiling the deal with equity investment firm Silver Lake, and backed by a $2 billion loan from Microsoft.

The company said it had signed "a definitive" agreement to give shareholders $13.65 per share in cash -- a premium of 25 percent over Dell's closing share price on January 11, before reports of the deal circulated.

The move, which would delist the company from stock markets, could ease some pressure on Dell, which is cash-rich but has seen profits slump, as it tries to reduce dependence on the slumping market for personal computers.

The plan is subject to several conditions, including a vote of unaffiliated stockholders.

It calls for a "go shop" period to allow shareholders to seek a better offer.

The company founder said Dell has made progress in its turnaround strategy "but we recognize that it will still take more time, investment and patience, and I believe our efforts will be better supported by partnering with Silver Lake in our shared vision."

"I am committed to this journey and I have put a substantial amount of my own capital at risk together with Silver Lake," he added.

Under terms of the deal, Michael Dell, who currently owns some 14 percent of Dell's common shares, would remain chairman and chief executive and boost his stake with "a substantial additional cash investment," a company statement said.

Additional cash for the deal will come from Silver Lake, a major tech investment group, and MSD Capital, a fund created to manage Michael Dell's investments.

The plan also calls for a $2 billion loan from Microsoft, rollover of existing debt, and financing committed by Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse and RBC Capital Markets.

Analysts have said the deal may give the company a chance to regain some footing in a market in which smartphones and tablets are overtaking laptop and desktop computers.

"Michael has been trying to turn Dell into a supplier of enterprise solutions for a long time," said Roger Kay, analyst with Endpoint Technologies.

"He has pleaded with Wall Street to give him time."

Kay told AFP that going private would make a transition easier by avoiding the spotlight of "ugly results," which could come from scaling back the PC business.

"The commodity PC business has been suffering," Kay said.

"Dell may probably keep the higher margin consumer lines, but maybe look at rest of the portfolio."

Kay added that Microsoft's participation in the deal suggests that Dell would remain in PCs and the Windows-based ecosystem.

Deutsche Bank's Chris Whitmore in a research note this week that Dell "would be free to execute his turnaround without the scrutiny of the public market" with "flexibility to do what he sees fit in order to drive long-term value."

The analyst added that Dell "could get more aggressive" in its enterprise software and cloud services, to make the company less dependent on PCs.

The Texas-based computer maker, which Dell started in his college dormitory room, once topped a market capitalization of $100 billion as the world's biggest PC producer.

Dell is now the number three global PC maker, behind Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, according to the latest report from market tracker IDC, showing Dell's market share of 10.6 percent in the fourth quarter.

Rival HP said in a statement that Dell "has a very tough road ahead" with "an extended period of uncertainty and transition that will not be good for its customers," adding that HP "plans to take full advantage of that opportunity."

Microsoft's participation further clouds the role of the Windows software maker, which has begun its own hardware efforts with the Surface tablet.

Microsoft said in a statement it "is committed to the long-term success of the entire PC ecosystem and invests heavily in a variety of ways to build that ecosystem for the future."

-AFP/ac

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