Computer Information - myOddPc
Happy birthday: take a trip in America's largest flying gadget (part 1)
Filed under: Transportation
Sometimes even the plugged-in Engadget reader needs to pick up and head out for more relaxing climes. Well, for our
fourth birthday this month we're treating six lucky people to two round trip tickets destined for anywhere
Virgin America flies. We wouldn't want you traveling in something that doesn't have power, network, and a seatback terminal, though, so you don't have to sweat about completely unplugging to get from point A to point B. Check out the rules below, and good luck!
- Leave a comment below. It is in honor of our fourth birthday, after all, so we wouldn't mind a bit of adulation -- but it's up to you.
- You may only enter this specific giveaway once. Although you can enter up to six times through the course of this six part giveaway, if you enter this specific giveaway more than once you'll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
- If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you'll be fine.
- Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don't make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
- Winner will be chosen randomly. That winner will get two round trip tickets anywhere Virgin America flies. Tickets are valid through May 31st, 2008, and are blacked out May 22-26. Approximate value is $599 per pair. You can only win once.
- Entries can be submitted until Friday, March 28th, 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
- Full rules can be found here.
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Chrysler adding WiFi, data to ho-hum '09 fleet
Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation, Wireless
Chrysler's added a few
features to get geeks' motors running over the years, but internet access is definitely a fresh direction. Apparently cars rolling off the line this and next year will have some kind of cellular data access (we're not yet sure if that's through an straight MVNO or piped through machine to machine data service like Jasper Wireless) and in-car WiFi first as an option, and then eventually standard. Details are sparse but we hear kids can spend, like, hours on the Facebook and the MySpace, so chalk another one up to team parents keeping team back-seat occupied.
[Via
Autoblog, thanks Andrew]
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CEO of failed WiMAX operator calls the technology a "disaster"
Filed under: Wireless
We haven't heard too many specifics when it comes to performance of actual WiMAX rollouts (and let's be real, we're all kind of waiting for LTE at this point, right?), but Garth Freeman, CEO of Buzz Broadband, apparently shuttered the company's Australian WiMAX rollout in Hervey Bay, publicly declaring that for his company and customers the technology "failed miserably". Apparently beyond about a mile from the base station non-line of sight performance was "non-existent", regular indoor use produced latencies as high as 1000ms even just 400m away, and the company had to scrap its network for TD-CDMA service on 1.9GHz just to make sure customers weren't completely left in the cold. Maybe they should have checked for an
errant satellite, eh mate?
[Via
Slashdot]
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LG adopts in-plane switching tech for new LCD HDTVs
Filed under: HDTV
Hitachi's in-plane switching technology's been making the rounds of late, and LG Taiwan's the latest to pick it up for use in future LCD HDTVs. Doubling frame-rate, providing a wider field of view, and supposedly upping durability (among other things), apparently we can start to see some IPS-enabled TVs from Korea's #2 in the not too distant future.
[Via
Far East Gizmos]
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Network Solutions Suspends Site of Anti-Islam Film
h4rm0ny notes the furor over an anti-Islamic movie due to be released on the Web in the next week. After Pakistan disrupted YouTube worldwide over an interview with right-wing Dutch MP and filmmaker Geert Wilders, Network Solutions, acting as host as well as registrar, has suspended Wilders's site promoting the 15-minute film "Fitna" (a Koranic term translated as "strife"). The site now displays a notice that it is under investigation for possible violations of NetSol's acceptable use policy. According to the article the company's guidelines include "a sweeping prohibition against 'objectionable material of any kind or nature.'" The article describes the site's content before NetSol pulled the plug as a single page with the film's title, an image of the Koran, and the words "Coming Soon." No one but Wilders has seen the film to date. The Dutch government has distanced itself from the film, fearing Muslim backlash. A million Muslims live in The Netherlands. Wilders's party, which controls 9 of 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, was elected on an anti-immigration platform.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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ISPs Losing Interest In Citywide Wireless Coverage
The New York Times is running a story about how hope is fading for the implementation of municipal wireless access in cities across the US. Major cities and small towns alike are finding that ISPs are withdrawing from such plans due to the low profitability of ventures that are similar to Philadelphia's incomplete network. We've previously discussed Chicago's and San Francisco's wireless status, and also some of the stumbling blocks other cities have faced. From the Times: "In Tempe, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., for example, hundreds of subscribers have found themselves suddenly without service as providers have cut their losses and either abandoned their networks or stopped expanding capacity. EarthLink announced on Feb. 7 that 'the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company's strategic direction.' Philadelphia officials say they are not sure when or if the promised network will now be completed."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Australian WiMax Pioneer Calls It a Disaster
Anonymous Coward writes "Garth Freeman, CEO of Australia's first WiMax operator, sat down at the recent International WiMax Conference in Bangkok and unleashed a tirade about the failings of the technology, leaving an otherwise pro-WiMax audience stunned. His company, Buzz Broadband, had deployed a WiMax network over a year ago, and Freeman left no doubt about what conclusions he had drawn. He claimed that 'its non-line of sight performance was "non-existent" beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.' We've previously discussed the beginnings of WiMax as well as recent plans for a massive network in India.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Calculating the Date of Easter
The God Plays Dice blog has an entertaining post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. "Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21... [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years]."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Astronomers Find Oldest Known Asteroids
Researchers from the University of Maryland have recently discovered three asteroids that appear to be roughly 4.55 billion years old, dating back to the formation of the Solar System. The scientists say that the asteroids have survived relatively unchanged since that time, and make good candidates for future space missions. "'The fall of the Allende meteorite in 1969 initiated a revolution in the study of the early Solar System,' said Tim McCoy, curator of the national meteorite collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. 'I find it amazing that it took us nearly 40 years to collect spectra of these [CAI-rich] objects and that those spectra would now initiate another revolution, pointing us to the asteroids that record this earliest stage in the history of our Solar System.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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University of Penn. Recommends Against Vista SP1
At least one university liberal enough to accept the deeply flawed and mostly rejected Vista OS is recommending faculty and students stay away from SP1. "University of Pennsylvania tech staffers are advising faculty and students not to upgrade their computers to the new service pack for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The school's Information Systems & Computing department said it will support Vista SP1 on new systems where it's pre-installed, but added that it 'strongly recommends that all other users adopt a "wait and see" attitude,' according to a newly published department bulletin." And CIO magazine doesn't quite go so far as to call on Microsoft to throw away Vista, but it does ask its readers to weigh in on that topic.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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