Category: Computers, Science & Technology

Yep… you read that right! “Beam me up, Scotty!”

Beam Me Up: ‘Teleportation’ Is Year’s Biggest Breakthrough

“Thanks to physics, and the truly bizarre quirks of quarks, those Star Trek style teleporters may be more than fiction.

A strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe — a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that teleportation or even time travel may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics, the rules governing ordinary objects. Toss a ball in the air and it falls back to Earth. Drop a coin from your roof and it falls into your yard. But back in March, a group of researchers designed a gadget that moves in ways that can only be described by quantum mechanics — the set of rules that governs the behavior of tiny things like molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

And the implication — that teleportation and even time travel may someday, somehow be a reality — is so groundbreaking that Science magazine has labelled it the most significant scientific advance of 2010.”

Dewd! Android is taking over the world!

Google: We’re activating 300,000 Android phones daily

“Android activations have now surpassed 300,000 per day which equals the number of activations for Symbian worldwide, according to data provided by Google. It also indicates that the now near-continuous stream of new Android phones is having a positive effect on sales overall.

Back in October, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company was activating about 200,000 phones per day. The new number also comes from Google’s engineering chief Andy Rubin, who tweeted it on Wednesday night. It is not out of the question to think that Android may become the top platform in the world early next year.

Such a milestone shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: analysts have been expecting this to happen for quite awhile now. However, the speed at which it has happened — a fivefold increase in just the last year alone — likely gives its competitors some pause, if not cause for concern.

Surveys show that Android is now comprising about half of all smartphone sales in the US in the third quarter, and comScore found that the OS had nearly 15 percent of the worldwide market in October.”

Jeffrey Powers, from Geekazine, a fellow Techpodcasts.com netcaster, asked the TPN crew what we were predicting for next year in tech; here’s my predictions!

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Dr. Bill – The Computer Curmudgeon (www.DrBill.TV)

I predict that streaming video, and Internet Protocol TV will continue to grow in audience. Set-top boxes like the Roku box, and the Boxee Box will become even more popular, and more and more people will begin to get their TV fix from the net!

Google Chrome as an operating system will make decent strides this year, and there will be increasing interest in the Chrome based hardware that Google will introduce. Also, Android will gain even more market share from the iPhone!

Net Neutrality will become a “cause celeb” and will become more prominent as folks begin to push harder for Internet freedoms, as well as personal freedoms! This will be compounded by the increase in personal expression, such as podcasts, video netcasts, and the like, in which individuals will become more important than corporations in producing news and entertainment programming!

Hopefully, tonight… it will be the Roku Review!

What does it all mean? What about my Kindle? Yikes! I guess we will see soon!

Google Editions e-book venture to launch by year’s end

“Computerworld – After months of delays, Google will launch its e-book retail business, now being called Google Editions, in the U.S. before the end of the year, a spokesman for the company confirmed today.

The spokesman gave no reason for the delay and declined to offer other details. A Google executive had said in May that the company planned to sell digital books last summer.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the venture had cleared some technical and legal hurdles and that Google Editions would launch in the U.S. by year’s end and internationally in the first quarter of 2011. A federal court recently gave preliminary approval to a settlement agreement between Google and authors and publishers, which apparently has provided further impetus for the Google e-book concept.

Under the Google system, independent booksellers are expected to be able to sell e-books through Google Editions — and they have received contracts to make that happen, according to the WSJ report. Independent booksellers would benefit the most from Google’s concept.”

Grrrrr! This is the kind of thing that is SO frustrating! An ISP charges you ONCE for service, they shouldn’t be able to come back and say, “Oh by the way, we NOW want to charge you because you are using too much bandwidth!”

FCC getting involved in Level 3, Comcast Internet traffic spat

“Comcast is being criticized after it has decided to charge Level 3 Communications a surcharge for ‘excessive’ bandwidth usage. According to the cable provider, Level 3 is sending about five times as much data to Comcast as is going the other way, it said in a statement.

Under protest that it violates open Internet principles Level 3 is paying the surcharge. It claims Comcast essentially gave the company an ultimatum to accept its terms, which Level 3 had no choice but agree to or face possible disruptions. Comcast’s move has also spurred the FCC to ask for more information on the deal.

Level 3’s core business previously entailed the carriage of Internet traffic across the US, but it has increasingly turned to a distribution model in order to expand its business. Netflix’s popular streaming video service being one of its chief customers in this space. Obviously this change will also boost the amount of bandwidth that Level 3 would require.

‘Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content,’ Level 3 chief legal officer Thomas Stortz said in a statement. ‘This action … is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets.'”

Tablet computers are becoming more popular. Is this a new trend? Will it hurt “desktop” PC sales? Time will tell!

Will Tablets Kill the PC Star?

“THE AGE OF THE TABLET COMPUTER is upon us, and Wall Street stepped up its efforts this week to gauge just how destructive the trend will be to the traditional personal-computer market.

Computer-industry observers have been warning for months now that tablets are primed to ‘crowd out,’ or cannibalize, personal-computer sales because they can perform a lot of the same tasks but are cheaper and fit better with an on-the-go lifestyle.

The industry has only a few of the slate-style computers on offer at the moment, most prominently Apple’s (ticker: AAPL) iPad and Samsung Electronics’ (A005930.Korea) Galaxy Tab.

But dozens of companies have announced or are expected to release tablet computers of one sort or another in the coming months, ranging from Archos (JXR.France), a maker of chunky, brick-like portable video players, to ViewSonic, a maker of computer monitors.

The CEO of Acer (2353.Taiwan), currently No. 2 in PC sales, was quoted on Friday boasting the company will dominate tablet sales a couple of years from now.

And so the Street has been busy assembling models: On Monday, Citigroup’s team of analysts covering computers, software and semiconductors put out a report saying there will be 35 million tablet computers sold in 2011, with Apple’s iPad accounting for three quarters of the total, compared with almost 400 million PCs sold.”

OK, not quite what the headline says… it is just that in a recent post I said that we were heading toward ubiquitous Wi-Fi and that would lead to handheld devices that we would get streamed video on. And Netflix is coming out with streamed only account content.

Netflix foretells the future of content distribution with new streaming-only plan

“Netflix today announced a revision to its subscription tiers that simultaneously increased the price of its DVD-by-mail plans, and introduced a new bottom-tier plan solely for streaming TV and movies.

Similar to the streaming-only plan Netflix launched in Canada in September, Netflix subscribers will pay $7.99 a month for unlimited access to the Netflix Instant Streaming library. Previously, the cheapest plan cost $8.99 per month and included one-at-a-time DVD rentals as well.

That plan has now been bumped up to $9.99, and the two-DVDs-at a time plan has gone from $13.99 to $14.99. As the number of DVDs included in the plan rises, so too does the price increase. Netflix has tiers going all the way up to eight DVDs at a time, and that has risen from $47.99 to $55.99.

The introduction of the new streaming-only plan highlights a major shift in user behavior. In short, there are no DVD-only plans, but there is now a plan that involves no DVDs at all. Streaming has graduated from a companion service to one that can stand on its own.

‘The fact is that Netflix members are already watching more TV episodes and movies streamed instantly over the Internet than on DVDs, and we expect that trend to continue,’ Jessie Becker, Vice President of Marketing at Netflix said today.

The next big question is whether Netflix will graduate from being a complement to pay TV subscriptions to a real ‘cable cutting’ solution.”

OK, the Woz says he NEVER said Droid phones are better than the iPhone! OK, Woz, we believe you! So, let me just say that I say that Droid is better! (Not that anyone cares!)

My interest in this article is… is this the beginning of what we all want; which is really ubiquitous Wi-Fi. That is, I want to be able to do is use a Wi-Fi type device no matter where I am… it is just a matter of time! Whether on your own home network, or not! I realize this will require new security protocols and even greater awareness of what you’re doing with your handheld device, or notepad, or netbook computer. However, I think this is where we are heading, and once we get reliable ubiquitous Wi-Fi everywhere, we can then imagine the kinds of devices we will soon have access to: handheld streamed video delivered to us anytime, anywhere; it will truly be a brave new world! By the way, DARPA helped invent the Internet, so don’t count them out!

DARPA funds 100% wireless distributed computing experiment

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a proof-of-concept study at Virginia Tech to create a distributed computing solution that operates in a totally wireless environment and includes multiple computers and handheld devices.

DARPA’s interest in distributed computing stretches back more than 40 years, to the beginnings of what we now know as the Internet, when computer resources were scarce.

‘Traditional wired distributed computing has been around for many years, allowing computationally intensive tasks to be performed efficiently via many, physically connected computers,’ said Jeffrey Reed, principal investigator for the project and Electrical Engineering professor at Virginia Tech. ‘Our effort will focus on developing distributed computer systems that work in a cable-free environment, which will bring a new level of flexibility to users who need to work in rapidly changing, often challenging, mobile environments.’

Presently, computational power isn’t scarce, but wireless integrity is, so the first part of this project will focus on demonstrating the feasibility of wireless distributed computing on DARPA’s Wireless Network after Next (WNaN.) WNaN is a communications system that senses what parts of the wireless spectrum are free (Dynamic Spectrum Access), and automatically optimizes the network topology based upon the available resources. The goal is to create robust mesh networks using mostly affordable, commercially available hardware so soldiers can be more connected but at no great monetary expense.”