Sprint and Clearwire’s WiMAX service has been making occasional cameos throughout the five boroughs since at least June, but now it’s official: the service has been launched, closing up one of the most conspicuous holes in coverage so far. This matches up nicely with the San Francisco go-live we reported on earlier today, so you’ll now be able to take your red eye from the Big Apple to the City by the Bay without fear that your EVO’s going to get slow when you go wheels-down. Plans run from $25 a month (for the iSpot) all the way up to $55 for a mixed-mode WiMAX and EV-DO data stick, which works out to somewhere between 0.00001 and 0.0003 percent of your housing costs in Manhattan. Glass is half full, y’know.
[Thanks, Marcus]
Update: We’ve just been contacted by Clear and told that New York’s still in the “operational readiness” phase of the go-live, which means hardware’s only being offered to customers in limited areas and not all hardware is available (notably, the iSpot isn’t yet being offered). Same goes for Los Angeles. San Francisco, meanwhile, isn’t yet there — we’re told there might be some limited pockets where service is showing up, but Clear hasn’t commercially launched there, even on a limited scale. For what it’s worth, all of these areas are still expected to go fully live in 2010, they’re just not quite there yet.
Previously, the drives were released as “Stormtrooper Unmasked” — a blind assortment with Han and Luke’s identity hidden until opened. Which means, if you’re a sole Solo fan, you could get stuck with a darn Skywalker jump drive. But now, this limited edition of 500 drives allows you to pick your character of choice. The new item offers Luke or Han’s luscious locks, along with the customary Stormtrooper helmet. Customers now have the option of having their favorite characters masked or unmasked.
Both Luke and Han are available in a range of 2GB to 16GB of storage space and come preloaded with character-specific Star Wars MIMOBOT-themed images, wallpapers, and avatars.
It’s been available for some VAIOs in Japan, and some intrepid individuals have even gotten it working on non-VAIO computers, but it looks like VAIO users in the US can now finally get some official PS3 Remote Play support. We’re still trying to track down a complete list of the computers supported, but it looks like the update at least covers the VAIO EA series, and includes all the functionality you’d expect — streaming, Bluetooth keyboard support, etc. Be sure to let us know in comments if the update has hit your VAIO.
Jorno, a Bluetooth keyboard that can turn compatible mobile devices into a pocket-size laptop, folds up to measure 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches by less than an inch.
It’s unclear whether the dude was speaking out of turn, but an HTC regional director responsible for North Africa and the Middle East has gone on record with gulfnews saying on no uncertain terms that the company “will be launching Windows Phone 7 handsets next month.” Of course, that lines up nicely with just about everything we’ve been hearing lately — not to mention the torrent of HTC-specific leaks we’ve seen — and if true, it gives Microsoft a pretty generous buffer ahead of its holiday 2010 guidance for the platform’s commercial release. He goes on to say that HTC will be releasing “around five more models by end of the year,” though it’s not clear how that mix will fall between Android, Windows Phone 7, and possibly even Brew MP; the Desire HD and Desire Z seem like a nice way to close out the year on the Android side of things if you ask us, which leaves plenty of room for awesome WinPho hardware. Sliding landscape loudspeakers, anyone?
Netflix could be preparing to launch its streaming service to Canadian customers, Hollywood Reporter claims. But for now, Netflix isn’t talking. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20017170-17.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Digital Home/a/p
You know that dual-SIM handset you picked up last year to make those frequent jaunts between Belgium and Luxembourg so much easier? Might as well throw The Netherlands in there to complete the Benelux triangle, as Spreadtrum has just announced a new single chip that enables support for three SIM cards within a single handset. The SC6600L7 solution allows for a trio of SIMs to run simultaneously, and as you’d expect, it’s aimed at the multiple-operator-market and at double agents who need on-the-fly access to a range of phone numbers. According to the company, trials have just wrapped up in a variety of nations, but there’s no published word on when any phone makers will begin integrating this into their lineup. Tomorrow would be nice, eh?
When we’re constantly barraged with new computers, smartphones and tablets, it’s hard to take the time to appreciate small details that have a lot of significance. Take AirPlay, for example: a feature integrated into Apple’s iOS devices to wirelessly stream content to the new Apple TV.
That feature has the potential to be killer, even at its most practical level, my friend Arnold Kim of MacRumors.com points out in today’s Tweet of the Day: “didn’t really occur to me before, but instantly streaming iphone 4 captured vids to appletv via AirPlay is a pretty killer feature.”
Think about it: You shoot some video of your kids running around in Disneyland, and when relatives or friends visit, you whip out your iPhone, tap “AirPlay” and boom — that video is streaming to your Apple TV and playing on the big screen. (You can do the same with a photo slideshow or music stored on your iOS device.)
Sharing personal media isn’t normally so seamless: You usually have to plug in a cord and copy files onto a drive, or upload media to a website and wait for it to process. Streaming, on the other hand, is instant.
Here at Wired.com we’ve pondered about the big-picture potential for the Apple TV to be a real game changer thanks to iOS and AirPlay. If third-party apps such as Hulu, Netflix or ABC Player are able to incorporate AirPlay to wirelessly stream online video content to a TV without requiring a mess of cords or extra accessories, then Apple TV might finally be a smashing hit. Turning the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad into a multimedia remote was a clever move that effectively turned Apple TV into a media ecosystem built around iOS mobile devices; Wired.com chief Evan Hansen thinks this strategy will disrupt the cable industry.
But as marvelous as that all sounds, building up a major alternative to the traditional cable TV subscription is going to take a great deal of time, even for Apple. In the nearer future, when the Apple TV ships in the next week or two, the hassle-free convenience of being able to share your personal media with a tap of a button should be extremely compelling for gadget lovers.
This article was written on September 03, 2007 by CyberNet.
CyberNet Exclusive Look
We’ve decided to break away from our normal CyberNotes today to take an exclusive look at the features in Opera 9.5 (codename Kestrel). Opera has done a remarkable job of keeping the specs and features of Opera 9.5 under wraps. The Opera Desktop Team wrote a post last week that detailed some of the under-the-hood work that has been going on in 9.5, but as expected, they steered clear of mentioning the most notable features. After all, they want to save the excitement for the big Alpha release tomorrow!
Luckily I was able to test drive Opera 9.5 a little bit early, and it’s only fair that I share my findings with you (and we have Opera’s permission of course). I’ve put together a 5-minute video review that details four of what I believe to be Kestrel’s most notable features. So you can start out by watching the video, or you can read through the article as I cover each feature there as well.
–Video Introduction–
I thought it would be best if I start with a video of Opera 9.5’s new features. All of these are covered in detail below, but this will give you a really good idea of what you can expect tomorrow when Opera 9.5 Alpha is released.
–Rendering Engine–
It’s been over a year since Opera’s rendering engine has seen any significant improvements, and this time around there are some significant improvements. Kestrel is now running the same rendering engine that powers the Wii Internet Channel browser as well as Opera Mini 4 Beta, and there are some astonishing differences…probably due to the thousands of bugs they’ve fixed.
I’ve been told to expect to see the rendering speed get better as further builds get released, but I have a hard time believing that they can get better than what I’ve seen. I decided to do a rather unofficial speed test to see how fast the different browsers rank in terms of loading our site (with an empty cache). I did three tests for each browser and averaged out the time it took for each to completely load our site. Here are the results with the slowest browsers first:
Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
Firefox 2: 15 seconds
Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds
Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds
Aside from speed improvements, the site compatibility has also gotten much better. They’ve fixed problems with various Google sites, some issues with the default WordPress template, and corrected a few things with some of the JavaScript libraries. Opera 9.5 can now handle many more sites…with ease!
Here are some of the other updates in Kestrel related to the rendering engine:
A lot more CSS3 support, including complete Selectors
Support for JavaScript 1.5 Getters and Setters
AJAX compatibility has been improved
New JavaScript engine that is faster and more efficient
Improved HTML table layout algorithm
–Open With… (in the video)–
Despite all of the hurdles Opera has overcome with their new rendering engine, there are still some sites that probably won’t work as they should. Opera isn’t going to deny that it happens, and they are actually going to do what they can to help the situation. You can now right-click on any site and choose to open it in another browser that is installed on your computer!
I’ve also been told that the “open with” command will work with some files as well, but complete support hasn’t been added yet. I would like to see this feature extended to things like images so that I can right-click on an image and have it open in Paint.NET without needing to save it first.
–Restore Windows (in the video)–
Opera has a little trash can on the Tab Bar that is normally used to restore tabs you’ve recently closed (which can also be done with Ctrl+Z). Kestrel has introduced a new feature that will let you restore entire windows that you have closed, which includes all of the tabs contained within that window. I don’t open multiple windows very often, but I know this feature will come in handy.
–Sync Bookmarks (in the video)–
This is one of those things that I had said Opera needs to work on the most. By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service. Now Opera users will have the same pleasure! All you need is a free My Opera account, and you’ll be able to privately synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial sites, and Personal Bar with their server. You’ll then be able to access that data whether you’re at work, home, or anywhere!
To setup synchronization just select the “Synchronize with My Opera” option from the File Menu.
–Full History Search (in the video)–
The search capabilities in Opera 9.23 vs. Opera 9.5 are like night and day. They have now introduced full history search that looks back over all of the pages you’ve visited. I’m not talking about just scanning the URL and title of the page either…it looks at all the text contained within each site!
There are two ways that you can take advantage of this feature, and the most common one will be straight from the address bar. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was typing in “thumb” into the address bar, and the resulting page that was returned is our homepage. That’s because I had recently visited CyberNet where “Thumbnails” was one of the words used, but it wasn’t in the title or the URL, it was just in the body of the article.
If you’re looking for a more detailed way to search your entire history, just type opera:historysearch into the address bar. The result will be a Google-like search page where you can type the keyword(s) that you are looking for. It will then return the results that matched just like in this screenshot:
–What You Don’t See–
It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.
Of course Opera still starts almost instantaneously, which is one of its best qualities. And memory usage has (somehow) gotten better. I’ve never seen Opera 9.2 climb over the 250MB marker, and that was when I would have 50 to 100 tabs open at the same time (hey, I go through a lot of news in a days time). Now it seems to run at about 80% of the memory usage that it used to, and for most people it will hover between 25MB and 70MB.
–And There’s More!–
I’ve covered most of the big stuff above, but that’s not everything! Here’s a list of some other things that have been improved in Opera 9.5:
The Status Bar is enabled by default…yay!
The “Save your password” dialog box does not stop the page from loading behind it. That way you can verify that the username and password you entered works before actually saving it. What a great feature!
Content blocking is better
A “drag to scroll” feature has been added that will let you scroll by “grabbing” the page, much like in a PDF reader. You can enable it by typing opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan into the address bar.
It supposedly looks better on a Mac, and conforms to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately I don’t have a Mac to try that out on.
–Making it Better–
There are some things that I believe Opera can do to make the final product even better, but one of the most important is inline spell checking. This is often the first complaint I hear from existing Firefox users who try Opera, and I think it is an extremely useful feature.
–Overview–
There’s no doubt in my mind that Opera 9.5 is going to be a truly amazing browser once it is released, and it will likely raise the bar for other browsers. However, the build being released tomorrow is an Alpha, and it will have issues at first. There might be sites that don’t work properly with it, and if you decide to try this out, make sure to install it in a separate location from your stable Opera installation.
For more details on some of the backend work done to Kestrel, read this article posted by the Opera Desktop Team.
Computer servers in data centers could do more than respond to requests from millions of internet users.
IBM researchers have patented a technique using vibration sensors inside server hard drives to analyze information about earthquakes and predict tsunamis.
“Almost all hard drives have an accelerometer built into them, and all of that data is network-accessible,” says Bob Friedlander, master inventor at IBM. “If we can reach in, grab the data, clean it, network it and analyze it, we can provide very fine-grained pictures of what’s happening in an earthquake.”
The aim is to accurately predict the location and timing of catastrophic events and improve the natural-disaster warning system. Seismographs that are widely used currently do not provide fine-grained data about where emergency response is needed, say the researchers.
IBM’s research is not the first time scientists have tried to use the sensors in computers to detect earthquakes. Seismologists at the University of California at Riverside and Stanford University created the Quake Catcher Network in 2008. The idea was to use the accelerometers in laptops to detect movement.
But wading through mounds of data from laptops to accurately point to information that might indicate seismic activity is not easy. For instance, how do you tell if the vibrations in a laptop accelerometer are the result of seismic activity and not a big-rig truck rolling by?
That’s why IBM researchers Friedlander and James Kraemer decided to focus on using rack-mounted servers.
“When you are looking at data from a rack that’s bolted to the floor, it’s not the same as what you get from a laptop,” says Kraemer. “Laptops produce too much data and it’s liable to have a lot of noise.”
Servers in data centers can help researchers get detailed information because they know the machine’s orientation, its environmental conditions are much better controlled, and the noise generated by the device tends to be predictable.
“The servers in data centers are the best place you can have these machines for our software,” says Friedlander. “We know their location, they are on 24/7,” he says. “You know what floor they are in the building, what their orientation is. In case of an earthquake, you can calculate the shape of the motion, so it tells you about the force the structure is going to be subjected to.”
To generate reliable data, the servers have to be spread across an area. And the number of computers participating can be anywhere from 100 to a few thousand.
The servers would have to run a small piece of software that the researchers say is “incredibly light.”
The hard-drive sensor data collected from a grid of servers is transmitted via high-speed networking to a data-processing center, which can help classify the events in real time.
With the data, researchers say they can tell exactly when an earthquake started, as well as how long it lasted, its intensity, frequency of motion and direction of motion.
IBM researchers hope companies with big data centers will participate in the project. “It would give them an advantage,” says Friedlander. “It would tell them about their company, their machines, and help their people.”
Over the next few months, IBM hopes to start a pilot project using its own data centers and to invite other companies to join in.
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It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.
