PARIS - L'architecte français Jean Nouvel a démenti jeudi avoir renoncé à la tour Signal, un gratte-ciel de 300 mètres presque ...

As it looks ahead to an exponential increase in Internet traffic, VeriSign is planning to pump $300 million into upgrading the .com DNS infrastructure through Project Apollo.

Ron Dennis will oversee production in new £40m Woking facility after he quit carmaker's Formula One team last year

Ron Dennis, the boss of McLaren, insisted today he had "moved on" from Formula One as he launched the company's new super car.

Production of the road car, the MP4-12C, which will cost about £150,000, will start next year at a new £40m facility at the company's futuristic headquarters in Woking, creating 300 jobs.

McLaren Automotive, which is planning more new models, is hoping to eventually sell 4,000 cars worldwide each year. The company has made limited numbers of more expensive super cars in the past, but never this many.

Speaking to the Guardian, Dennis admitted he had expected withdrawal symptoms at the Australian grand prix last spring, his first after quitting the sport.

"I was full of expectation in Australia last year that I would go and get some sort of withdrawal," the 62-year-old said. "But I don't have to watch every minute of a grand prix even when I'm not there. It's part of my life and it's not gone but I've moved on to bigger challenges."

Nevertheless, he retains a strong attachment to the sport which he dominated for decades. Looking out from his office, over a lake and towards the field where the new production facility will be constructed, he said a tunnel would be built to connect the two sites, carrying what he calls "umbilical cords" such as IT lines.

Dennis, whose fortune the Sunday Times last year estimated at £87m, is clearly proud about McLaren's achievements in F1, making it the sport's second most successful team after Ferrari. Asked if he was worried that McLaren's push into larger-scale manufacturing was a risk, given the demise of other iconic British sports car manufacturers such as TVR, he said: "I don't want to be in any way derogatory to the business models of any of the other small car manufacturers. I never saw them in any grand prix or have any success in the motor sport it represents."

He also hit back at speculation that he had been forced to pass on the reins of the F1 team after McLaren was fined $100m (£65m) by its governing body, run by Max Mosley, over the 2007 "spygate" saga. He insisted he had been planning his move for some time.

"The story is I'm afraid heavily spun. My plan was always to pass team principal to Martin [Whitmarsh] at the beginning of 2009. Even if you're reluctantly pushed on to a pedestal then there's nothing more certain that the same people pushing you on to the pedestal will take every opportunity to rip you off it," he said.

• Automotive industry
• Manufacturing sector
• McLaren
• Ferrari
• Formula One

Tim Webbguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Established in 1998, Agava is one of Russia’s top 5 web hosting companies employing around 300 people. Last night, police investigators arrived at a datacenter where Agava has some of its operations.

The investigators had a self-awarded warrant which allowed them to conduct a search in order to retrieve evidence located on servers used by Agava client iFolder.ru, a large file-hosting service and Russia’s 51st most-visited site

The police had been working on an investigation into an individual who used iFolder to upload child pornography a while ago. The person was caught by the police, but investigators wanted to search to see if he had uploaded more material.

Agava employees offered their full co-operation in assisting them to find the data in question. However, the police turned down the offer and insisted they were going to seize all of Agava’s servers, more than 100 in total, and waited for several hours for a vehicle to come and collect them.

In the end the mass seizure did not take place but police did cut the power and seal them all off. Some of those affected are Agava’s primary DNS servers, but fortunately their secondary units were unaffected.

“Agava considers this unprecedented event as putting in jeopardy and dimming the future of every business in RuNet,” said the company in an announcement. “We are determined to challenge and overcome the excessive and destructive actions we encountered, to protect our customer’s interests. We thank our clients in advance for their patience, and for media and other support they provide us with.”

Even though the police have stated they have no problem with iFolder continuing its operations, the investigation has rendered the site completely non-operational. On a normal day, 180,000 people upload or download from the service resulting in 1.5 million pageviews. Total users per month is around 4.3m.

This action against iFolder follows the unilateral decision to seize the domain name of Russia’s biggest torrent site, Torrents.ru.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

I suppose you are talking about the size of swf in the html page (which you have seen at HTML Wrapper creation dialog). The size is in the wrapper, i.e. in the file that is by default called wrapper.html and by default is created in your source folder. Open it and look for "400" and "300" strings in it (Ctrl+F). These values are present in 3 places in this file.

 

By the way you can create wrapper not only at module creation step but at any time by clicking Tools | Flex | Create HTML Wrapper.

Réunis depuis trois jours dans la capitale thailandaise, plusieurs dizaines de milliers de « chemises rouges » (UDD/DAAD), partisans de l'ancien Premier ministre Thaksin Shinawatra, ont collecté 300 litres de sang. Puis, ils ont manifesté en aspergeant de leur sang la résidence de l'actuel Premier ministre, Abhisit Vejjajiva. Thaksin Shinawatra a fait fortune dans les télécommunications et est devenu le principal opérateur de téléphonie mobile, de télévision satellitaire et de transport aérien low-cost du Sud-Est asiatique. Durant son mandat de cinq ans, l'homme d'affaire a quadruplé sa fortune personnelle et omis de payer des impôts. Il a durement réprimé la minorité musulmane, faisant tuer au moins 2000 personnes. Il a livré, trois mois durant, une impitoyable guerre aux drogues, qui a fait plus de 2500 morts et facilité la re-concentration des filières. Suspecté de vouloir instaurer une république, il a été renversé en 2006 par l'armée alors qu'il était en voyage à New York pour l'Assemblée générale (...)

The “location wars” between rival mobile check-in services, the unmet expectations of the Twitter keynote and the hordes of newbies crowding out regulars (as they do every year) were some of the leading threads at SXSW this year. And — rightfully so — everyone was talking about them. Meanwhile, from the outside, skeptics pooh-poohed geeks getting drunk on promo budgets while pretending that changing the world had anything to do with why they were there. Also fair. But somewhere in between those two takeaways fall my three highlights from SXSW, which I think showed us the way social technology will work in the near future:

Foursquare tattoos seemed as ubiquitous at SXSW as people staring down at their phones when they walked into a room.

• While the competition among location-based services will hopefully result in a winner, loser or combination thereof sooner than later (because honestly, who cares), using either Foursquare or Gowalla in Austin this past week was a really cool experience. Rather than seeing scattered updates from the few friends you have who happen to avidly use social media, at SXSW location-based services were able to take a larger-scale pulse of where people were moving. So as you walked down the hall, the wisdom of crowds would tell you that 300 people were listening to a session in Ballroom D, or that 200 were already drinking over at Six Lounge. Sure, that just pushes hordes towards hordes, but it also reveals a vibrant ecosystem — and felt completely different than using mobile social sites at home.

• It was totally awesome to have reliable and quick AT&T phone service and mobile Internet. As I tweeted on my first day in town, “My breakout stars of #sxsw so far: excellent, ubiquitous Wi-Fi and great AT&T service. No joke.” And trying to use my iPhone upon returning to San Francisco has made it all the more obvious how awful we have it by comparison. It’s no fun to be a second-class mobile citizen after you’ve gotten a taste of what could be. I completely support MG at TechCrunch’s take: “Dear AT&T, Whatever You’re Doing At SXSW, Please Do It In San Francisco.”

A snapshot of Austin check-ins from SimpleGeo's Vicarious.ly mashup

• You’ve undoubtedly heard horror stories about exposing the backchannel of audience conversation during conference panels and how that detracts and distracts from the core content. But I had a really excellent experience engaging with tweets during the panel I moderated. First of all, the crowd helped direct us to choose a less unwieldy hashtag than the one assigned — #contentme instead of #contentrelevanttome. Then I kept a Twitter search page open to see what people were saying. When the tweetstream was drowned out by fun facts about coincidences on Hunch given by panelist Hugo Liu, the company’s chief scientist (for instance, if you tell Hunch you like to dance, there’s a very high correlation that you’ll also say you like using Macs), it got harder for me to pick out audience questions. So I asked them to direct the questions to me by mentioning @lizgannes in a tweet. When I got too many questions to process, I was able to choose the ones that had been retweeted by other people on Twitter (who may have not even been in the room).

That’s kind of a long story, but the point is that I hadn’t actually planned to do any of it. But because so many people in the room were using Twitter at the same time, we were able to use it to better tweak the panel on the fly in order to address their needs. (Though I did feel afterwards that I should watch a video of the panel; multitasking is damn hard!)

Top photo courtesy of Flickr user schatz.

* Key Features:
* Camera: 3.15 MP, 2048x1536 pixels, autofocus, the Touch approach, geo-tagging
* Video: VGA 30fps
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Operating system: iPhone OS (based on Mac OS)
Processor: ARM Cortex A8, 600 MHz, Graphics PowerVR SGX
* Browser: HTML (Safari)
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Dimensions: 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm
* Weight: 135g
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* Type: TFT Capacitive Touch screen, 16M colors
* Size: 320 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches
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* Ringtones:
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Memory:
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* Call records 100 received, dialed and missed calls
Internal Memory: 32 GB of storage, 256 MB RAM
* Data:
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Mbps * 3G HSDPA, 7.2
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* Bluetooth: v2.1
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* Messaging: SMS (see threaded), MMS, Email
* GPS: A-GPS
* Digital Compass
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* Audio / Video
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* Voice command / dial
Battery: Standard battery, Li-Ion
* Standby time: Up to 300 h
* Talk time: Up to 12 hours (2G) / Up to 5 h (3G)
* Music playback: Up to 30 h
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Square Enix va consacrer les images du jour de Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2, aux bestioles du jeu, ce qui tombe assez bien puisqu'elles seront au cÅ“ur du gameplay avec pas moins de 300 créatures à capturer pour ensuite les entraîner et au final les faire fusionner pour en obtenir de plus puissantes qu'on pourra à nouveau entraîner et...

Dutch web monitoring company WatchMouse has done a thorough analysis of uptime and performance of 14 major URL shortening services, with quite disheartening results.

As it turns out, only two of these (goo.gl and twt.tl) have had a perfect uptime record between 02/14/2010 and 03/16/2010; the rest of the pack mostly had minor uptime issues, while snurl.com and tr.im had uptime below 99%.

When it comes to performance, measured in the same time period, most URL shorteners can only be characterized as slow. Most of them add over half a second to the time it takes to open a link; Facebook’s fb.me has been by far the slowest, while only Google’s goo.gl and youtu.be can really be called fast, both averaging just over 300 miliseconds.

Given the popularity of URL shorteners on social networks such as Twitter, this is a big deal. Simply put, while URL shorteners do provide a useful service, they’re also making the web considerably slower.

WatchMouse has also launched an online URL shortener performance monitor located at the (ironically, not very short) address http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/. Over there you can see uptime and performance status and history for 15 popular URL shortening services.

Tags: url shorteners, web

Un nouveau Philips 24 pouces à 300 euros

It's a mighty aggressive schedule for a handset that hasn't even been announced yet, but the latest scuttlebutt regarding the HTC Incredible suggests that the phone will make its debut on Verizon's airwaves about two weeks from now. It was already known that the Incredible was destined for a rendezvous with Big Red, but this latest word solidifies and specifies that future nicely -- and it's claimed to come directly from internal sources at Verizon. There's also further mention of 512MB of DRAM allied to a downclocked Snapdragon CPU (capable of 1GHz, running at 768MHz), an 8 megapixel camera, a 1,300 mAh battery, and body dimensions almost indistinguishable from those belonging to the Nexus One. Good thing too, since Verizon is still keeping us waiting on a mysterious Spring release of Google's own-brand phone. We get the feeling Android 2.1 and the new Sense UI will fill that gap nicely, however, and if you really must have that 1GHz speed, there are ways to achieve such things too.

[Thanks, Carson R.]

Verizon's Incredible new phone may be in stores within 'two weeks' originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's no surprise that Best Buy is encouraging customers to pick up Samsung's 3DTV and Blu-ray player at the same time, but smart buyers should doublecheck to make sure they're actually saving money before they walk out of the store. Next week's advertisement does feature Best Buy's price on the UN55C7000 that's $300 lower than the MSRP, and grabbing the display and player all at once gets a free Starter Pack throw in with two pairs of glasses and the Monsters vs. Aliens flick, but the $3,419 package deal at the lower right and its "$780" savings?. That claimed price throws in a $150 Geek Squad install to set up the TV, connect WiFi and "sync your 3D glasses," while also including the TVs price and $349 estimated Starter Kit value. While there might be some customers who don't know their HDMI from their WEP key who can save that way, we're figuring most Engadget readers can keep a few bucks in their pocket and hook things up themselves, and if you're looking to grab another pair of glasses, it's probably important to save anywhere you can. The real insult here however, can be found to the right, encouraging buyers to pick up The Blind Side right away, instead of waiting to rent from Redbox or Netflix.

Best Buy's 3D bundle pricing isn't as much of a deal as it appears originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Publication Date: 2010 Mar 14 PMID: 20228792Authors: Chapman, J. A. - Kirkness, E. F. - Simakov, O. - Hampson, S. E. - Mitros, T. - Weinmaier, T. - Rattei, T. - Balasubramanian, P. G. - Borman, J. - Busam, D. - Disbennett, K. - Pfannkoch, C. - Sumin, N. - Sutton, G. G. - Viswanathan, L. D. - Walenz, B. - Goodstein, D. M. - Hellsten, U. - Kawashima, T. - Prochnik, S. E. - Putnam, N. H. - Shu, S. - Blumberg, B. - Dana, C. E. - Gee, L. - Kibler, D. F. - Law, L. - Lindgens, D. - Martinez, D. E. - Peng, J. - Wigge, P. A. - Bertulat, B. - Guder, C. - Nakamura, Y. - Ozbek, S. - Watanabe, H. - Khalturin, K. - Hemmrich, G. - Franke, A. - Augustin, R. - Fraune, S. - Hayakawa, E. - Hayakawa, S. - Hirose, M. - Hwang, J. S. - Ikeo, K. - Nishimiya-Fujisawa, C. - Ogura, A. - Takahashi, T. - Steinmetz, P. R. - Zhang, X. - Aufschnaiter, R. - Eder, M. K. - Gorny, A. K. - Salvenmoser, W. - Heimberg, A. M. - Wheeler, B. M. - Peterson, K. J. - Bottger, A. - Tischler, P. - Wolf, A. - Gojobori, T. - Remington, K. A. - Strausberg, R. L. - Venter, J. C. - Technau, U. - Hobmayer, B. - Bosch, T. C. - Holstein, T. W. - Fujisawa, T. - Bode, H. R. - David, C. N. - Rokhsar, D. S. - Steele, R. E.Journal: NatureThe freshwater cnidarian Hydra was first described in 1702 and has been the object of study for 300 years. Experimental studies of Hydra between 1736 and 1744 culminated in the discovery of asexual reproduction of an animal by budding, the first description of regeneration in an animal, and successful transplantation of tissue between animals. Today, Hydra is an important model for studies of axial patterning, stem cell biology and regeneration. Here we report the genome of Hydra magnipapillata and compare it to the genomes of the anthozoan Nematostella vectensis and other animals. The Hydra genome has been shaped by bursts of transposable element expansion, horizontal gene transfer, trans-splicing, and simplification of gene structure and gene content that parallel simplification of the Hydra life cycle. We also report the sequence of the genome of a novel bacterium stably associated with H. magnipapillata. Comparisons of the Hydra genome to the genomes of other animals shed light on the evolution of epithelia, contractile tissues, developmentally regulated transcription factors, the Spemann-Mangold organizer, pluripotency genes and the neuromuscular junction.post to: CiteULike

I was glad to see Joel Postman's post on his Socialized blog: Social Media Isn’t Conversation, It’s Publication because this has been a subject close to my heart.

Joel writes:

...I mentioned one of my favorite Marshall McLuhan quotations, “Publication is self-invasion of privacy.” We threw this idea around a little and together came up with the idea that online communications are a form of publication, not conversation, and a failure to understand this distinction can be troublesome...

I agree, social media is about publishing, not conversations.

About a year ago, I wrote about "The Myth Of Online Conversations: Lots Of Chatter But Not Much Discourse

What is so striking about the online world is how little conversation takes place, how little two-way communication happens.

One comment to an article is not a conversation. 300 comments on an article is not a conversation.

Yet everyone talks about social media being about "conversations." A PR firm I sometimes work with is called "The Conversation Group."

Social media is not about conversations it is about publishing.

Social media represents the fact that we have now wired up the other end of the Internet, your end.

The Internet enabled us to publish to any computer screen no matter where. Now, any screen can publish back. This is huge.

That's what social media is about. Its about publishing, allowing anyone to publish back. Its feedback, it's a response, it's not a conversation.

A printing press in your pocket...

What is extraordinary, is not the 'conversational' nature of the Internet, but the fact that now every screen is a printing press.

I can publish from any screen, small or large, yours or mine. I have the equivalent of a printing press, with the reach of tens of millions, in my pocket. And so do you.

It's no wonder Rupert Murdoch is pissed. You used to have to be a media mogul to have a printing press.

It's not the content...

Let's not get distracted by the content, the endless Tweets about inane things, the blog posts about nothing-in-particular...

The content is not the message. The message is that we now have an online printing press, (and TV studio, and radio studio) nearly anywhere, and everywhere we are. That's huge.

Internet 1.0 was about being able to publish to anything with a computer screen. Now, anything with a screen can publish back. That's what social media represents...

We've wired up the other end of the Internet. It's a two-way Internet now. This is the Internet on steroids.

If you thought Internet 1.0 was amazing, you ain't seen nothing yet.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll occasionally hear me talk about “audience atomization overcome.” I’ve been using this phrase to describe something that has changed in our word because of the internet.

Audience Atomization Overcome

The people formerly known as the audience, once connected up to big institutions and centers of power, but not across to one another, have overcome their own atomization, which was a normal condition during the age of mass media. With the rise of social media they are now connected horizontally, peer to peer, at the same time as they connect vertically: to the news, the program, the speaker, the spectacle. Simple example: Tweeting during the Academy Awards. More intricate example: Pet lovers find each other on affinity sites when the major media isn’t attentive to their concerns.

The horizontal flow changes the situation for speakers and producers in any communication setting that retains the trappings of one-to-many. The change is especially dramatic in an arena I know well: the professional conference where I might sit on a panel or attend a presentation. The popularity of the backchannel—years ago it was IRC, today it’s Twitter—has empowered those in the audience to compare notes and pool their dissatisfaction during a performance that misfires. Audience atomization has been definitively overcome, raising the bar and increasing the risk for speakers who walk in unprepared.

Especially at risk are “big name” speakers whose online or offline status is such that they may complacently assume their presence alone completes the assignment and guarantees success. Organizers may be so delighted to have landed the CEO of the hot company or the thought leader in a particular space that they fail to ask for much in the way of new material or a carefully thought-out ideas. This was always a problem at conferences; what’s different is the audience is able to do something about it, and they will savage you on Twitter if you falter.

These facts were clearly in view for me and my colleagues as we prepared for our recent panel at South by Southwest: The future of context. We were acutely aware that the bar had been raised, especially at a conference like SXSW where everyone is wired. When Twitter CEO Evan Williams appeared at South by Southwest for a keynote interview, the answers felt so thin to so many that he had to post this after.

Here are ten things we did in recognition that audience atomization has been overcome. I must say: our plan worked. The Future of Context was the most well-received panel I have ever been on. (A good live blog of it is here, a reaction post here, a sample tweet here. The room—Hilton H, a big one—was full and people were turned away.)

How to avoid getting killed in the backchannel

1. Unfamiliar to them, super familiar to you. First, you need a subject that hasn’t been picked to death at conferences. But it’s got to be something you grok. I wrote my first post on background narratives vs. newsy updates in 2008; I’ve been thinking about it since then. Co-panelist Matt Thompson introduced the phrase “the future of context” in 08, as well. He spent a year on the problem as a fellow at the University of Missouri. In a sense, we had two years prep time.

2. Go for intellectual diversity. We had a mainstream journalist (Matt Thompson of NPR) an academic (me) a software developer and entrepreneur (Tristan Harris of Apture.com) and a tech writer and reporter (Staci Kramer of paidcontent.org.) The youngest panelist was less than half the age of the oldest. We had an African-American and three whites, a woman and three men. People notice.

4. Get serious about advance planning. One conference call (“So Sally…what do you want to talk about?”) is not what I mean by serious. We had five calls over four months. We worked out a beginning, middle and end that made sense to all of us: Frame the problem, drill down on a few specifics, float possible fixes, then go to the crowd.

5. Blog it first. Eight days before the SXSW panel I posted News Without the Narrative Needed to Make Sense of the News: What I Will Say at South by Southwest. A few days later Matt Thompson posted The Case for Context: My Opening Statement for SXSW and Tristan Harris came in with Context: The Future of the Web. By blogging it first we could promote the event with something juicier than “come to my panel!” We could use early reactions to hone later presentations. We had three comment threads active before the panel started. Here’s how I curated the discussion my pre-post engendered. This pre-tweet told me to underline a key distinction between informative and informable.

6. Create a dedicated site for the panel. Welcome your crowd to it. See futureofcontext.com, which Matt Thompson pulled together. Anyone can post at it or comment. And it says to the audience: welcome, we set a place for you.

7. The title you pick should be “write once, run anywhere.” (Why that phrase?) Thus: the future of context is simultaneously the name of the SXSW panel, the domain name of the site, the hashtag on twitter and the search term we wanted to claim.

8. Watch the backchannel like a hawk during the event. This chart shows that the hashtagged tweets were coming in at a rate of almost 300 an hour. It’s your moderator’s job to monitor that flow, sense where it’s going and react when necessary by talking directly to the backchannel. This takes someone who can scan posts and type quickly. Staci Kramer did that. After the five phone calls and the three blog posts and the dinner the night before to go over the plan, she already knew what we were going to say, which allowed her to focus on the incoming.

9. Leave at least 40 percent of the time for Q and A. Anything less than that and people start resenting you for hogging the mic. It’s amazing to me how many panels cannot manage this simply feat of timing.

10.Arrange a meet-up directly after for those who want to continue the discussion and interact with the participants face-to-face. This was something I wish we had thought of. (It was suggested to me by Jeremy Zilar of the New York Times, who attended.) That way no one walks away wishing there was more time.

Now if you’re thinking that none of these ideas is particularly original or ingenious— well, I agree. My point is you need a complete approach to avoid getting killed in the backchannel and give demanding conference-goers what they have come to expect.

Of course there’s another alternative: the unconference, where the room is the panel.

Quanta Computer is the maker of Sony's latest VAIO M series netbook, which has just been launched in the UK with a price of 300 pounds (US$460), according to industry sources.

AdvantageWest, DigitalChalk and Google announce the Juicy Ideas Collegiate Competition, 2010. Student teams from over 300 eligible colleges are participating in the competition for a chance to win the student opportunity of a lifetime, a trip to Google. (PRWeb Mar 18, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/juicy_ideas/contest/prweb3743894.htm

Thursday, March 18, 2010

As reported the United Nations, January 12 Haiti earthquake left exactly 222,570 deaths, 1,300,000 refugees in harbours, 766,000 displaced people, 310,000 injured and 869 disappeared. The report also mentioned economic loss suffered by the country, that reached 7.754 billion dollars, leaving 71 percent of the Haitians in extreme poverty.

More...

The Federal Communications Commission issued the long-awaited National Broadband Plan this week, a 376-page document that makes clear the agency accepts the reality of the current wireline duopoly — and as such, has decided to put the burden of competitive pressure on mobile broadband.

There are many consumer-friendly aspects of the plan, such as opening up set-top boxes (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) and creating an easy-to-understand label that shows people what their broadband connections are capable of (see image). But the FCC has clearly decided against a plan that requires a new infrastructure buildout when the current infrastructure will suffice. If only the agency had moved to tackle this issue back in 2002, when the telecommunications providers were thinking about how their fiber rollouts were going to occur, and implemented policies that could have resulted in a shared nationwide fiber network.

When Life Gives You Lemons …

But now that Verizon is spending $19 billion to push fiber to the home for 80 percent of its footprint (although that push may be slowing) and cable providers have pushed fiber out closer to the home in their networks and are deploying DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades, the FCC needs to work with what ISPs have in the field. So the bulk of the wireline reform coming out of the plan consists of regulatory tweaks to address predatory special access charges, inter-carrier compensation rules, set rates for access to underground conduits and utility poles, and in-depth proposals for universal service fund reform.

Yes, the FCC is proposing that wireline networks will be faster if the 2020 goal of 100 Mbps speeds down and 50 Mbps speeds up are met, but that’s a goal, not something I’m sure the FCC can and will enforce. Another goal is 1-gigabit connections to community centers and schools, which depending on how it’s implemented could help drive faster networks as well. But again, those are 2020 goals.When it comes to ensuring competition between the duopoly in the short term, the FCC will rely on data. The plan proposes changes to both the type and amount of data the FCC collects, and also asks the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect information on how people use broadband.

The FCC says it will watch for price discrepancies and inequalities as newer networks are deployed and the types of services available to consumers diverge in speeds from wireless broadband’s 1 Mbps downstream speeds to fiber’s 100 Mbps downlink speeds. However, it doesn’t lay out how such inequalities — if they do emerge — will be addressed. Rather, mobile broadband is the star of the plan, both because it offers hope of a third broadband competitor in many areas, and also because of the potential for future growth and innovation of the U.S. economy.

Airwaves Are The Key

I’ll write more in the coming weeks on the spectrum aspects of the plan. The details as to how the FCC plans to go from having 50 MHz available for mobile broadband today to 500 MHz in 10 years will result in a pretty big legislative battle as the FCC tries to nab broadcaster spectrum and incumbents and tech firms position to own large chunks of those valuable airwaves.

But the real benefit of mobile broadband as a competitive stick is threefold: it can cover the entire country relatively cheaply, existing operators are already moving to all-IP networks that the FCC sees as the future of its regulatory jurisdiction (the airwaves will always be part of the FCC oversight even if Internet applications and services are not), and the infrastructure is easily upgradable without tearing up streets and installing gear into people’s homes.

So to push the mobile broadband envelope the FCC wants to take actions to free up 300 MHz by 2015. The chart lays out the spectrum bands and the timing for this FCC airwave grab, and I offer a bit more context below.

WCS — This spectrum is contentious because Sirius Satellite is worried about interference from any cellular operators deploying service in this band. The plan proposes to resolve that issue this year.

AWS 2 and 3: These 60 MHz should be relatively easy to get to auction or to allocate for mobile broadband once the government makes some decisions. At issue with some of this spectrum is whether it will be paired with spectrum the FCC will have to carve out from other federal holdings. The agency hopes to figure this pairing issue out with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration by Oct. 1. Paired spectrum is useful for deploying the more common, forward division multiplexing-type of networks.

D Block: These 10 MHz were too much trouble during the last spectrum auction because they were burdened with huge public safety network rules. The goal, to which the plan dedicates an entire chapter and $6.5 billion, is to build out a nationwide public safety network so all local, state and federal first responders can communicate in case of an emergency. These 10 MHz will have to connect with spectrum set aside for the National Public Safety network, and will have to be deployed to work with commercial handsets using LTE network technology. This makes such spectrum a good bet as a safety valve or a backup chunk of spectrum for an existing provider.

MSS: Mobile satellite service providers such as Terrestar, SkyTerra, and Inmarsat own spectrum in this band because they’ve promised to build a combination satellite-and-terrestrial network. So far they’ve failed to make good on that promise, and I have huge doubts that they ever will. The FCC appears to be relaxing some of the more stringent requirements on satellite providers to see if they can deliver a credible mobile broadband service with devices consumers will buy. If the FCC eliminates some of the satellite requirements, the MSS spectrum holders hope their spectrum becomes more valuable.

Broadcast TV: The FCC hopes to pry 120 MHz away from broadcasters in urban areas, where cellular providers have the most need for spectrum, which will pit the FCC and carriers against big broadcasters and over-the-air television watchers in big cities. Oh. My. God. It’s going to be a showdown. But I’m glad the FCC isn’t going for a token spectrum grab from rural broadcasters, which would be easy but wouldn’t alleviate network congestion.

The FCC isn’t making friends in Congress (or with over-the-air television buffs) with this plan, but as the final arbiter on how televisions have to send out their signals, it has the ability to squish some channels together and dictate how broadcasters use their 6MHz channels. To ease the pain of the FCC flexing this power over broadcaster’s spectrum allotments, it’s asking Congress to change the way spectrum auction proceeds are shared so as to let broadcasters have a piece of the pie. To bolster its controversial move, the FCC points out that cellular companies have valued each megahertz of spectrum per person covered at $1.28 while the television spectrum is currently valued at 11-15 cents. Why? Because mobile broadband is the future and over-the-air television is on its way out. Heck, the FCC even notes that poor consumers could get their broadcast through subsidized IPTV instead.

Getting more spectrum is the biggest aspect of expanding mobile broadband, but rules to make it easier to deploy microwave backhaul are also in the queue for 2010. And the FCC pledges to allocate a band for unlicensed wireless, although it doesn’t specify where this band might be. It also touches on the white spaces broadband the FCC approved in 2008, basically saying it wants to see devices and networks using white spaces broadband soon. We do, too. We thought we’d have more than a few trial networks by now. For folks watching and waiting for this flood of spectrum, the FCC and the NTIA set a deadline of Oct. 1 of this year to identify additional spectrum for use.

Since mobile broadband is the lynchpin of our federal broadband plan, we’d better get this right.

The mayor of Sarasota, Fla., went swimming with the sharks today — yes, literally — in an extreme effort to woo Google and land that sweet fiber network the company plans to dole out to some lucky town. And he’s not alone. Cities across the country have Google fiber fever, pulling off stunts like renaming their city “Google” (formerly Topeka, Kan.) or having the mayor jump into a frozen lake (Duluth, Minn).

My city of Alameda, Calif.? We’re passing a city council resolution!

Heaven knows I want a 1 gigabit-per-second connection, too — so why isn’t my mayor wrestling an octopus (or sharktopus)? Is Sarasota (or Duluth, or Topeka) on to something?

“We don’t have a burgeoning tech and creative industry,” explained Richard Swier (see disclosure below), who is spearheading Sarasota’s attempt to get Google fiber. And without such an industry, he felt his town had to do something “crazy” in order to get on Google’s radar. In addition to the shark tank, Sarasota declared one of its islands “Google Island,” and its I Want Google Fiber in Sarasota page on Facebook claims some 5,300 fans.

Alameda’s more sober approach certainly lacks flair, but that, too, is by design, according to Deputy City Manager Jennifer Ott. She believes the message Google sent out in its call for participation was that the company wanted speed, efficiency and regulatory assistance, which the city council’s resolution, with its task force and one point of contact for the entire project, was specifically designed to do.

Jim Meyer, who founded the non-profit WireAlameda.org, echoed Ott’s all-business approach. “We have a strong application,” he assured me.

Since an active community behind the project was another one of the criteria set by Google, I asked Meyer about our paltry number of Facebook fans and the dearth of big, showy community events. Meyer pointed out that Facebook is a competitor to Google, so the group didn’t want a big presence there, and in terms of big events, WireAlameda is organizing a community chalk-drawing event this weekend. Chalk drawing certainly won’t attract mainstream media attention (unless it’s laser chalk), but it’s not meant to — the point is to showcase townsfolk that come out in order to pitch in.

In the meantime, an unexpected benefit has emerged: The actions of Swier’s group, WireAlameda and others around the country have become a rallying point for towns beaten down by tough economic times. Amidst the constant news of layoffs and general bad times, Google’s gambit is giving people something they haven’t seen in awhile — hope.

**Disclosure: I went to high school with and played 9th grade basketball with Swier. We haven’t talked really at all since high school, but his relentless efforts and recruiting on Facebook clogged up my news feed and provided inspiration for this story.

Image courtesy of Flickr user RRaiderstyle

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A running mantra through the climate debate is that global warming is global indeed. Now, however, a scientist has found that localized "CO2 domes" could increase urban smog and other air pollution problems.

In a study published in Environmental Science & Technology , Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson estimated that the effect could cause the premature deaths of 50 to 100 people a year in California and 300 to 1,000 for the continental United States. By comparison, anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 people a year die in air pollution-related deaths.

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Après la ville de Dresde en décembre dernier c’est au tour de notre capitale, Paris, de se doter d’une photo panoramique de 26 gigapixels (26 milliards de pixels)…

A l’initiative de ce projet on retrouve Arnaud Fricht et Martin Loyer qui ont réalisé les 2346 photos du haut de la tour de l’église Saint-Sulpice durant l’été 2009 à l’aide de deux Canon EOS 5D Mark II montés de téléobjectifs Canon 300 mm F4.0. Cette sublime photo a été réalisée avec l’aide de la société Kolor (spécialisée dans les panoramas) et de leur logiciel AutoPano Giga.

Sur le site Paris-26-gigapixels.com vous aurez la possibilité de vous déplacer sur toute la photo en zoomant à votre convenance un peu partout. Si vous êtes curieux, et que vous aimez jouer à « Où est Charlie », je vous invite à chercher les 10 objets insolites répartis un peu partout dans l’image (il vous faudra trouver deux ovnis, un pistolet sur un toit, la photo « tagguée » de l’équipe, le nombre Pi sur une pharmacie, un reblochon sur table, une tortue, une marmotte, une grenouille, l’adresse du site sur une plaque d’immatriculation, et le feu tricolore tout rouge).

Via Emob | Thugeek

Yamaha Bass Guitar 5 String Blk, RBX375 Mint Condition 300,00$ Call 514-979-9288....

Contrairement aux attentes, le nombre de chômeurs indemnisés a baissé de 32.300 en février, sa plus forte chute depuis novembre 1997. Le taux au sens national est ainsi ramené à 4,9% contre 5% en janvier.

In an under-appreciated announcement Skyhook Wireless released a huge set of location trend data. SpotRank, as the data is called, shares out ranking trends for locations around the world. The maps above show the SpotRanks of those locations. Skyhook has been collecting look-ups for the past five years. CEO Ted Morgan shared these stats "We average about 300 million...

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.

[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]

It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to care.

Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5."

"When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right -- our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a particular set of features. Done right, HTML 5 applications will feel more like real apps than Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."

Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+ libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries that IE should be using now natively.

Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features, not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it instead.

But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.

For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple (apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:

"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms difference."

When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard. But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today, Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of one language, the fog would be lifted:

"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers. That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8. Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."

As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same markup.

The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on 7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8.

"Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers across the board.

Meanwhile, the IE9 preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3 standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox, by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?

"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."

Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU... Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU

The architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right, was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago.

"In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there. And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a slower interpreter."

Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse, and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code -- 100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions (for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under 30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.

Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background process:

"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."

HTML 5 in large print, SVG in small print

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch playing catch-up with Chrome.

Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first time, directly and openly supporting SVG.

It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9 browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.

HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG. Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.

Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance, the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.

Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its special site devoted to the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.

The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is building a Web applications platform. Finally.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010