Chinese telecom manufacturer says Motorola sold trade secrets
Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei Technologies has filed a lawsuit against Motorola, accusing the technology giant of trying to transfer Huawei's intellectual property to Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) without permission. The move is the latest in the two companies' spat over trade secrets—a dispute that could potentially hold up the sale of Motorola's wireless business.Huawei and Motorola maintained a healthy relationship for nearly a decade, as Huawei's radio access and network technology was used in Motorola's wireless business. According to Huawei, Motorola not only had access to Huawei's intellectual property, the company also made use of Huawei's team of 10,000 engineers in order to create and sell handsets directly to customers.
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Rumor: PSP2 to feature OLED touchscreen, 3G capabilities
Later this week, on January 27, Sony is holding an event where it's widely believed that the oft-rumored successor to the PSP will be officially unveiled. But, as is so often the case, it looks like some of the details have been leaked before the big announcement.According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, via Kotaku, the PSP2 will have 3G capabilities and will be able to connect to the NTT DoCoMo network, which is one of the largest cell phone providers in Japan. There's no word yet on whether or not any Western providers have pledged their support.
In terms of hardware, the report claims that the PSP2 will feature an OLED touchscreen. OLED screens are brighter and provide better and wider viewing angles, but also have a shorter lifespan compared to LED or LCD screens. Sony has already implemented OLED touchscreens in some of its other products, including the CyberShot line of digital cameras, so this doesn't seem too far-fetched.
It's all rumor for now, of course, but we'll likely learn just what the PSP2 is and what it can do on Thursday. Will it be enough to compete with the Nintendo 3DS? And how will the PSP2 compare to the rumored PlayStation phone? Hopefully, we'll get those answers soon.
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Your iPad is an arcade cabinet: the journey from joke to product
ThinkGeek has a great system to drum up free publicity: fill the site with "fake" products to get its fans drooling on April Fools Day, and then wait for the blogs to hyperventilate over the idea of actually owning some of the items. Last year one of the products was the "iCade," a dock for your iPad that added arcade-style controls and made the system look as it if were a tiny arcade cabinet. The reaction to the product was immediate: gamers wanted it.ION Audio stepped up to the plate to create the device, and showed it off at this year's Consumer Electronics Show to a receptive audience. How did this all happen?
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Philanthroper hopes to boost charity of the day, $1 at a time
As the Obama campaign learned before the 2008 Presidential elections, piles of money can be made by asking a large number of people to make small donations, sometimes multiple times apiece. That's a concept that should be—but usually isn't—utilized by charities and nonprofits. Usually they ask for a commitment of $20, $50, $100, or more, and sometimes, that $20 is just enough to hold people back from giving to a good cause.
Donation size is just one of the many issues people encounter when giving to charities. Do you have the time to research every cause and figure out which one is a best use of your funds? Some people do, but most of us don't. What about vetting every one to make sure their tax returns are on the up and up? And forget trying to go through fundraiser sites, many of which keep a cut of donations for themselves to cover various costs.
Those are all things that a new site called Philanthroper hopes to address. Launched by Mark Wilson (Gizmodo editor by day, philanthropist by night), the site takes the idea behind Groupon and crosses it with micro-donations, all while carefully selecting the deserving causes and vetting them for legitimacy. The goal is to offer a daily charity pick—six per week, with Saturday and Sunday sharing one—with a donation amount of just $1 per person for 24 hours until the next charity is featured.
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Hands on: Dolphin HD browser for Android is swimmingly good
One of the strengths of Google's Android mobile operating system is its support for customization. Android enthusiasts can augment the capabilities of their Android device by replacing key components of the platform with superior third-party alternatives.There are a growing number of really great third-party home screen implementations and Web browsers that users can install directly from the Android Market. Some of the popular Web browsers include Opera, Skyfire, Firefox, and Dolphin HD. We plan to write up a full comparison at some point in the future, but decided to start by giving you a close look at our favorite: Dolphin HD.
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Windows Phone 7 three months on: a retrospective
When I reviewed Windows Phone 7, I'd been using it for a little over a week. At the time, I concluded:Read the comments on this post
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Freedom! Danger! Talking heads sound off about net neutrality
It's August 2010, and MSNBC's now former host Keith Olbermann is revving up for Story Number Four on the evening Countdown."Here on the web right now all websites, e-mails, videos and so on reach your computer at the same speed," Olbermann observes, "and that's true if you are checking your bank statement, trolling the Countdown website, or looking at photos of [he pauses and grins] your cousin. It's called 'net neutrality,' where no form of content is favored over another."
All this could all come to an end, Olbermann warns, because "Google and Verizon are nearing a deal that would affect what content users see and when, turning the Internet into something akin to cable TV and the tier system."
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Feature: The evolution of computer displays
Current computer graphics are fairly well known and understood. But how did we get here? The evolution of computer graphics is intertwined with textual display, and it is difficult to consider the two separately.An old saying has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. The exact quantification of the value of imagery versus text appears to vary somewhat with subject matter, and is probably better left to psychologists and social scientists. But there is little question of the kernel of truth in the saying, and it has been a driver of computer architecture for many years.
Computer graphics are taken for granted today. But it has been a long and painful struggle, with hardware rarely keeping up with the demand for better images. In English, there are a relatively small number of characters which comprise text. The same is not true of images: graphics are computationally intensive. They always seem to take as much speed and memory as there are available. But the demand was high enough that early computer graphics could be fairly crude and still be in demand.
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Excellent K-9 mail app for Android keeps your messages on a leash
Google's conventional e-mail client for Android has always felt like a second-class citizen compared to the company's GMail application. It has a very limited user interface, lacks basic features like support for moving messages between folders, and isn't particularly reliable. Google has been slow to address the program's weaknesses and doesn't seem to notice most of the complaints.Fortunately, there is a good third-party fork called K-9. It's not particularly pretty, but it's highly functional and well-maintained. K-9 is based on Google's original Android mail client and is similarly distributed under the open source Apache license, but it's got a whole pile of additional features.
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Trailblazing DIY pinball game snags Pioneer Award for Bill Budge
Making a videogame used to be something to which only the highest-level geeks could aspire. And then Bill Budge came along.As one of the prototypical computer hackers of the early 1980s, Budge loved to program his Apple II computer, and he loved all the money he was making creating and selling games out of his house.
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Still got the right stuff: the next generation of rocket scientists
You could make the case that right now is the most exciting time in a generation to be young and interested in space. The Space Shuttle is preparing for its final flights, soon to be replaced by a new era of launch technology. "NewSpace" companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are lowering launch costs, paving the way for large-scale space exploration. Incentive competitions such as the Google Lunar X PRIZE are both spurring research and development and creating dozens of new groups for young graduates to bring their skills to.These are indeed heady times for the young and starry-eyed (of which, incidentally, your author counts himself as one), and these future space leaders aren't just sitting in class, waiting to join in. At college campuses and high schools around the world, students are actively preparing for a future in space, using weather balloons to photograph the curvature of the earth, engaging in rocketry competitions, and even designing orbital space settlements.
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Weird science finds booze makes its conductors super
We anxiously await superconducting tequila: It's not actually the booze that's superconducting, but it can improve the superconduction of another material. This one's in the arXiv, so it hasn't been through peer review yet, but the procedures seem so straightforward that it's difficult to imagine they got things wrong unless all the authors have been hitting their samples, which included "ethanol-water mixtures and alcohol drinks (beer, red wine, white wine, Japanese sake, Shochu (clear distilled liquor) and whisky)." The goal of the work was to improve the performance of a simple model superconductor, a mixture of iron, tellurium, and sulfur. Unfortunately, solubility issues cause problems, and the material has to undergo extensive water treatments before it supports superconductivity. Changing the treatment slightly by mixing some ethanol in must have seemed like a reasonable approach to accelerating the process. Why they thought booze might work better isn't obvious, but they checked, and it did. For the record, wine worked best, with reds outperforming whites.
Or you could just use a football fan's breath:
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New alleged evidence of Android infringement isn't a smoking gun
Patent reform activist Florian Mueller has published what he believes to be new evidence of copyright infringement in Google's Android software platform. He has found files in the Android code repository that have Sun copyright headers identifying them as proprietary and confidential.A close look at the actual files and accompanying documentation, however, suggest that it's not a simple case of copy and paste. The infringing files are found in a compressed archive in a third-party component supplied by SONiVOX, a member of Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA). SONiVOX, which was previously called Sonic, develops an Embedded Audio Synthesis (EAS) framework and accompanying Java API wrappers which it markets as audioINSIDE.
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Yesterday's Delta IV-Heavy rocket launch: a personal impression
I went to see the Delta IV-Heavy rocket launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California on January 20. With the capacity to lift 23 tons of payload to low-Earth orbit, the rocket was the biggest to launch from the west coast of the United States to date, and it was a spectacular show.
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"Crime is crime": meet the Internet police
John Morton, head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), wants netheads to know something about his agency: they are "not the police of the Internet." So what's the story with our headline? Morton made his comment about not policing the 'Net at the end of speech this week in which he talked about nothing except policing the 'Net. His agency may not be the police of the Internet, but it's certainly one of them, with its investigations "increasingly directed toward Web-based criminals." And Morton says that's a good thing.ICE doesn't get much coverage in the tech press, being more concerned with illegal immigration and shipping containers full of Coach knockoff handbags. But that changed in 2010 as ICE launched "Operation In Our Sites," which is "spelled s-i-t-e-s as a purposeful play on words."
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10 billion pairs of particles entangled with single radio wave
Researchers have managed to entangle ten billion pairs of particles at once, according to a letter in Nature this week. The group of scientists used phosphorus-doped silicon, a microwave pulse, and a radio pulse to achieve the record number of simultaneous entanglements. The process worked on 98 percent of the possible pairs and, while control over their states is still somewhat limited, the authors note that mass entanglement could be an important step for quantum computing.The experiment took place in a cube of silicon spiked with phosphorus ions, with the phosphorus's nuclei serving as one half of the entangled pair and one of the phosphorus' electrons (donated in a bond to a silicon atom) as the other half. The phosphorus donors were ideal for this, because materials doped into semicondunctors like silicon are able to hold particles in entangled states for seconds at a time. Other entangling materials, like photons, see the entanglement decay within a few thousandths of a second or less. The researchers needed all the extra time they could get to herd all of the particles into behaving in a similar way.
The researchers pulsed the particles with a microwave to set their wavefunctions to a particular state, and then sent a second radio frequency pulse to entangle the pairs. When they went to extract the particles' final state, they found that 98 percent of the attempted pairs had entangled, and the process worked on up to ten billion pairs at once.
Of course, creating the entanglements is only the first step—it's reading and writing to the entangled particles that will allow them to serve as quantum bits, or qubits, in quantum computers. Still, the ability to create all these pairs—the storage equivalent of 2.5 gigabytes—will be something future quantum computers will probably need to do.
Nature, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/nature09696 (About DOIs).
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XBMC now running on jailbroken Apple TV or iDevice
The open source home theater software XBMC has made the jump from the desktop to both the Apple TV and Apple's mobile devices running iOS. Getting XBMC to work on iOS required hacking into some private Apple APIs, though, so don't expect it to be available via the App Store anytime soon.Scott Davilla, accomplished Apple TV hacker and lead developer of XBMC for Mac OS X, told TUAW that enabling XBMC to run on iOS hinged on the discovery of a hardware decode API called VideoToolBox by GStreamer developer Ole André Vadla Ravnås.
"It's the API Apple 'should' have exposed instead of VDADecoder," Davilla explained. Also known as the Video Decode Acceleration Framework, it has been an official developer API since Mac OS X 10.6.3. However, "VDADecoder is just a thin wrapper around the VideoToolBox API," Davilla said.
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Catholic bishops, Protestant leaders: we need net neutrality!
On January 18, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter to lawmakers outlining top Catholic legislative priorities. The letter features well-known Catholic positions, including concerns on abortion and marriage law, support for universal healthcare, advocacy for "poor families and vulnerable workers"—but it also stresses the bishops' robust support for net neutrality."As the Internet continues to grow in its influence and prominence in Americans’ lives, we support legislation and federal regulations that ensure equal access to the Internet for all, including religious and nonprofit agencies, as well as those in more sparsely populated or economically distressed areas," said the letter. "True net neutrality is necessary for people to flourish in a democratic society."
This isn't an outlying position among US Christian leaders, either. The National Council of Churches, which represents everyone form the Episcopalians to the Presbyterian Church (USA) to the Orthodox Church in America to the United Methodists, issued a net neutrality resolution of its own on October 18, 2010.
"We jointly urge the Federal Communications Commission to take any and all action to adopt network neutrality, including reclassification of broadband services as a telecommunications service, as a fundamental and necessary part of the framework for all forms of broadband Internet service that will protect the freedom of every individual and group to see and hear and send any information they desire," said the resolution.
While the NCC skews liberal, even (some) conservative Protestants have jumped on the net neutrality bandwagon. The Christian Coalition, which is currently working for the "repeal of ObamaCare," has been a famous supporter of net neutrality for several years. This has been a controversial stand in conservative circles, but as far back as 2007, the Coalition was making "the conservative argument for net neutrality."
The reasons for this support aren't hard to find; churches simply don't have the financial resources of massive corporations, and they worry that they'll be priced out of using the Internet in effective ways. "This is what the net neutrality debate is really about, at its core," said the Coalition three years ago. "The ability of diverse voices and alternative views to continue to be heard, whether or not it is profitable for Viacom or Disney to air these views. It's about the ability of conservative activists and candidates to communicate directly to our members and supporters without paying an additional toll to Verizon or AT&T."
The NCC had similar worries. "If vital net neutrality protections are not assured by the FCC, large for-profit companies providing Internet services may have a commercial incentive to favor their own content over others and as a result could limit the activity and equal access of members of faith communities and other non-commercial organizations online," it said.
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If you can't buy it, build it: Google Offers to battle Groupon
Trying to buy Groupon is so passé—why not do what everyone else is doing and launch a deal site of your own? That's apparently what Google has decided to do after its failed bid to purchase the popular daily deal site. The service will be called Google Offers, the company confirmed, but the service is still in the testing phase and it will be a while before customers get to start signing up for yet even more deals.
Unofficial confirmation of the service came on Thursday via Mashable, which obtained leaked documents from the search giant. The documents showed a pretty standard Groupon competitor, complete with a localized deal of the day depending on the user's location and powered by Google Checkout. They also revealed that Google plans to pay 80 percent of participating business' share of the revenue three days after the deal runs, with the remaining balance being held for 60 days to cover refunds.
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Duke Nukem Forever arrives May 3; new trailer inside
The skies have opened, the gods have smiled, and 2K Games has announced an actual release date for Duke Nukem Forever. The game is for real, people have played it, and we know when it will go on sale to gamers who have waited over a decade to play the official sequel to one of the most-loved PC games ever released. You'll be able to buy your copy on May 3 in North America, and May 6 internationally. The game is coming to the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.Also, there is a new trailer. Take a look.
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