Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been focusing on gadget gift guides lately, so I thought I would mix up the lists a bit for TGIF and focus on architecture. Here are some of the best places to just kick back and relax.

This stunning home is embedded in a hill in Vals, Switzerland, but it still has some amazing views. Seriously, you could just grab a chair, a beer and look at it all day. Hit the link to see what I mean. [Iwann Baan via Link]
If there ever was a house that lived up to the name “Universe,” this space in Roca Blanca, Mexico would do it. The design is based on the Jantar Mantar Astronomical Observatory, which was built in Jaipur, in 1724. The home has 360 degree open air views of the ocean with swimming pools and hammocks. In short, everything you could ever want in a place to relax. [Link]
If you had a treehouse when you were a kid, you probably considered it as your own private sanctuary. Imagine what it would be like to have a treehouse that is 11 stories tall, with dozens of rooms for you to run away and hide in. [Link]
Spending a few nights in a hotel is a great way to escape from our miserable lives, but the Winvian in Connecticut is more exciting than most. It features themed rooms that would be so much fun you would have little reason to go out during the day. There are golf rooms with putting greens, a treehouse cottage, a music room with playable architecture and even a helicopter room with an actual Coast Guard chopper inside. [Winvian]
As much as I can’t stand the Cowboys, I have to admit that their ridiculously over-the-top stadium is probably the best place to watch a game on the face of the Earth. Super field-level luxury boxes, a mind blowing assortment of concessions and a HDTV that measures 159 feet across. If you were Joey Fatone’s brother, you would have even had the privilege of playing Gears of War 2 on that gigantic screen. Of course, that would mean you would actually have to endure the shame of being related to Joey Fatone.
There should be a crime against spending $2 billion dollars on a private home, but I’m sure you could have a lot of fun hanging out in Mukesh Ambani’s pad. Needless to say, this 22-story monstrosity has every kind of entertainment and relaxation facility you could imagine…and then some. [Link]
Prison may not be the most desirable place to be, unless you happen to be staying at the Leoben Justice Centre in Austria. Seriously, take a look at the pics in the following link. It looks more like a resort than a correctional facility. [Damn Cool Pics and Link]
Electronic House’s Home of the Year for 2009 is short on taste, but high on gadgets. If you were hanging out here, you would be treated to beautiful views, the latest in home automation, racing simulators and an absurd amount of home theater equipment. [Electronic House via Link]
This list contains some extreme homes, but Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich’s yacht takes excess to the high seas with a price tag rumored to have cost in the billions. While on board, you would be treated to every kind of luxury imaginable—and you wouldn’t have to worry about intrusion because the yacht is fitted with a missile defense system and anti-paparazzi laser shield.
What if one of the best places to kick back and relax was your office at work? Google has taken that approach with the design of their Swiss headquarters. It features cozy seating, pool tables, foosball and a top notch lounge. [Link]

Well we have to say we never saw this coming, but have dreamed of it for years, but it appears that the FCC is actually listening to the CEA and is asking for comments on how to replace CableCARD with something that would actually make the network open. For those just catching up, Congress mandated that cable had to be open with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — yeah that long — and 3rd party CableCARD devices first became available in 2004 and five years later there are only 14 3rd party certified devices and 443k 3rd party devices in service. The fact that CableCARDs just don’t work is no surprise to anyone who has tried to use one — ok we’re exaggerating here, but we’ve had our fair share installed and every one makes for a funny story. Now obviously admitting you have a problem is the first step, but it also means we are years away from a solution. But since they asked, here’s ours. Instead of silly cards and middleware, just specify a two way communications protocol and embed signed certificates that CableLabs will control the distribution of in the box for authentication and encryption. It really doesn’t have to be any harder than that.

Hell freezes over, the FCC admits that CableCARD is a failure originally appeared on Engadget HD on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Ars Technica  | Email this | Comments

Every ISP’s discussions of pricing plans, net neutrality or piracy invoke the same faceless villains: the bandwidth hogs. Benoît Felten, analyst and blogger, has been working in telecom for over a decade, and he wants proof these monsters even exist.

With the debate on net neutrality in full swing in the US, we’ve been hearing about Bandwidth Hogs again. ‘Bandwidth Hog‘ is a sound bite that conveys a strong emotion: you can virtually see the fat pig chomping on the bandwidth, pushing back all the other animals in the barnyard with his fat pig shoulders all the while scrutinizing with his shiny piggy eyes to see if the farmer isn’t around…

The image is so powerful that everyone thinks they understand what the term means , no one questions if the analogy is correct. In discussing this issue, Herman and I realised we had serious doubts about the existence of that potentially mythical beast. In fact, we are not sure even the telcos know what a bandwidth hog is and does.

But it makes great headlines: “Net Neutrality will force the telco’s to give The Internet away to Bandwidth Hogs”. They claim that bandwidth hogs steal all the bandwidth and cause network congestion, and therefore their behaviour harms all the other regular and peaceful law-abiding users. And to add insult to injury they pay the same price as the others! No, policing and rationing must be applied by the benevolent telco to protect the innocent.

Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5% and call them hogs.

For those service providers with data caps, these are usually set around 50 Gbyte and go up to 150 Gbyte a month. This is therefore a good indication of the level of bandwidth at which you start being considered a “hog”. But wait: 50 Gbyte a month is… 150 kbps average (0,15 Mbps), 150 Gbyte a month is 450 kbps on average. If you have a 10 Mbps link, that’s only 1,5 % or 4,5 % of its maximum advertised speed!

And that would be “hogging”?

The fact is that what most telcos call hogs are simply people who overall and on average download more than others. Blaming them for network congestion is actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the ‘all you can eat’ broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe. In other words, the marketing push to get people to subscribe to broadband worked, but now the telcos see a missed opportunity at price discrimination…

As Herman explains in his post, TCP/IP is by definition an egalitarian protocol. Implemented well, it should result in an equal distribution of available bandwidth in the operator’s network between end-users; so the concept of a bandwidth hog is by definition an impossibility. An end-user can download all his access line will sustain when the network is comparatively empty, but as soon as it fills up from other users’ traffic, his own download (or upload) rate will diminish until it’s no bigger than what anyone else gets.

Now I’m pretty sure that many telcos will disagree with our assessment of this. So here’s a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what’s happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don’t wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions.

Please email me if you’re interested. And please publicise this offer if you’re not in a position to extract such a dataset but are still interested in the answer. This is a much more important question than knowing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!

Reprinted with permission from Fiberevolution; written in collaboration with Dadamotive. Megahog source image from the AP via TheAge

I remember the day AMD announced it was going to acquire ATI. NVIDIA told me that its only competitor just threw in the towel. What a difference a few years can make.

The last time NVIDIA was this late to a major DirectX transition was seven years ago, and the company just quietly confirmed we won’t see its next-generation GPU, Fermi, until Q1 2010. If AMD’s manufacturing partner TSMC weren’t having such a terrible time making 40nm chips I’d say that AMD would be gobbling up marketshare like a fat kid. By the time NVIDIA gets its entire stack of DX11 hardware out the gate, AMD will be a quarter away from putting out newly refreshed GPUs.

Things aren’t much better on the chipset side either — for all intents and purposes, the future of NVIDIA’s chipset business in the PC space is dead. Not only has NVIDIA recently announced that it won’t be pursuing any chipsets for Intel’s Core i3, i5. or i7 processors until its various legal disputes with Intel are resolved, It doesn’t really make sense to be a third-party chipset vendor anymore. Both AMD and Intel are more than capable of doing chipsets in-house, and the only form of differentiation comes from the integrated graphics core — so why not just sell cheap discrete GPUs for OEMs to use alongside Intel chipsets instead?

Even Ion is going to be short lived. NVIDIA’s planning to mold an updated graphics chip into an updated chipset for the next-gen Atom processor, but Pine Trail brings the memory controller and graphics onto the CPU and leaves NVIDIA out in the cold once again.

Let’s see, no competitive GPUs, no future chipset business. This isn’t looking good so far — but the one thing I’ve learned from writing about these companies for the past 12 years is that the future’s never as it seems. Chances are, NVIDIA’s going to look a lot different in the future because of two things: Tesla and Tegra.

Continue reading Core Values: What’s next for NVIDIA?

Core Values: What’s next for NVIDIA? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Verizon announces that it will bring an OS update to the HTC Droid Eris in the first quarter of 2010. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-10409482-251.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Android Atlas/a/p