Technology
Sprint set to release 3G-enabling "case" for iPod touch
Recently released FCC documents reveal that Sprint is set to launch what appears to be a new case for the iPod touch that would enable 3G networking on the WiFi-only device. Manufactured by ZTE and called the "Peel," the case is essentially a MiFi-like mobile hotspot that snaps on to an iPod touch, giving it a network connection wherever you can get a Sprint 3G signal.
The Peel has its own 3.4Whr lithium ion battery, which is good for about 40hrs of standby time—there's no mention of how long it would last in active use, but our guess is perhaps a few hours. In addition to giving 3G network access to an iPod touch, it can also connect other WiFi devices. It doesn't appear to have a limit to the number of simultaneously connected devices (the manual submitted to the FCC suggests this number is configurable), unlike most mobile hotspots that usually limit connections to four or five. Phone Scoop also notes that the device is only cleared to operate on the slower EV-DO Rev 0 standard, and not the faster Rev A that most current 3G devices use.
We're not exactly sure what to think of the Peel (Apple, Peel, get it?). It seems that if an iPhone really appealed to you, you wouldn't have opted for the iPod touch to begin with. Then again, there are some users who would rather have an iPhone with data but no voice, and on a different network. Depending on the pricing and data options—especially if there is a pay-as-you-go option—it might be a nice complement to an iPod touch. The added utility of being able to connect multiple devices—one clear advantage over an iPhone—is offset somewhat by the slower 3G speeds.
Sprint tried to attract Apple device users with a similar tack when the WiFi-only iPad was released, offering users a free iPad case with a pocket that would fit the carrier's 4G/3G Overdrive mobile hotspot. Still, we're wondering if there are any iPod touch owners out there excited by this news. If you are, let us know in the comments.
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Congress ponders privacy of your underwear, immortal soul
At a Congressional Internet privacy hearing on Tuesday, a group of middle-aged men had some questions about the 'Net. Why was it such a creepy place? How come replying to spammers doesn't get one immediately removed from their e-mail lists? And what is this talk we hear about websites gaining the rights to one's immortal soul?
The creepiness was best summed up by the Senate Commerce Committee's Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who in his opening statement compared the Internet to a deeply disturbing shopping mall. In this mall, there's "a machine recording every store you enter and every product you look at, and every product you buy. You go into a bookstore. The machine records every book you purchase or peruse. Then, you go to the drugstore. The machine is watching you there, meticulously recording every product you pick up—from the shampoo to the allergy medicine to your personal prescription.
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Feature: WiFi "Hole196": major exploit or much ado about little?
The latest hole in WiFi security is quite serious, but it's unlikely to cause widespread disruption in the corporate and government networks for which it would have the potential to cause the biggest headaches.
In fact, the exploit continues to demonstrate a lack of any effective method of cracking the WiFi Alliance WPA/WPA2 certified versions of IEEE encryption standards found in WiFi gear of the past seven years. Brute force and dictionary attacks against short passphrases used typically on home and small-business networks are still the only means of key recovery.
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Internet Explorer 9 beta to arrive in September
Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner revealed today at the company's annual financial analyst meeting that the first beta of the Internet Explorer 9 Web browser is planned for release in September. This is a little later than expected; leaked documents that emerged last month pointed at an August release date for the beta.
Some apparently authentic screenshots of Internet Explorer 9 have leaked, though perhaps surprisingly, they show few changes from the current version. Microsoft has shipped three platform previews to show off the Internet Explorer 9 engine, but these previews used a simple, bare-bones interface; the company wanted to wait before revealing Internet Explorer 9's look and feel. If the new browser really is just a minor evolution of the old browser's interface, that decision seems a little peculiar.
The new browser is eagerly anticipated, especially by Web developers; Internet Explorer 9 is a big improvement on Internet Explorer 8, with considerably improved standards compliance and functionality. News of the beta is certainly welcome, but there's still a marked contrast between Microsoft's release policy and the more frequent updates of browsers like Firefox and Chrome. For all of its improvements, there's a good chance that Microsoft's browser will have been surpassed by its competition by the time it finally ships.
No release date has been announced, but most believe that the final version will not arrive until 2011.
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Magic Trackpad or tragic Mac pad? A review
When I was 12, using a Performa 600CD, my parents gave me an external trackpad accessory that connected via ADB (a moment of silence for Apple Desktop Bus, please... thank you) for my birthday. The useable surface area was tiny—maybe three-quarters the size of a 3.5" floppy—and clunky, but I thought it was the coolest thing ever... for about five minutes. I soon learned that tracking around your desktop computer to play Oregon Trail and put together school projects in Microsoft Word 6.0 was Serious Business, and the trackpad wasn't cutting it for me. The small surface was annoying, and the precision even worse. I eventually disconnected it and went back to my trusty mouse.
Seventeen years later, I find myself splitting my time between a 27" iMac and a 13" MacBook Pro; instead of Word 6.0, I deal with MacJournal and the Ars CMS, and instead of Oregon Trail, I play various online Scrabble knockoffs. I use a Magic Mouse and the multitouch trackpad that is built into my MacBook Pro. I constantly find myself trying to perform multitouch gestures—ones that only work on Apple's trackpad—on the mouse, and find myself regularly wishing for a better input device on my desktop.
When Apple introduced the Magic Trackpad, a standalone Bluetooth trackpad designed for use with Apple's desktop machines, I was cautiously optimistic. My previous dalliance in trackpad-on-desktop land ended poorly, but a lot has changed in a couple decades. Or has it?
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Bridging the gap between biomass and petrochemicals
This week's issue of Science takes a look at work that could help bridge the gap between biomass fuel production and traditional petrochemical engineering. Modern society relies on petrochemicals not only for our primary transportation needs, but also for most of the chemicals and polymers that we use. With the increased focus on using woody and agricultural stock to create biofuels, most notably bioethanol, it is worth asking if these feedstocks can support the rest of our petrochemical needs.
The issue contains a letter that focuses on two papers published this year, one by Bond et al. in Science, and one by Lange et al. in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The articles look into whether carbohydrates from biorefining processes can be used to create compounds that look and react like more traditional petrochemical feedstocks, which have less oxygen than carbohydrates. If this is possible—or, more importantly, if it is feasible—then biomass could be used as a starting material for our existing petrochemical infrastructure.
The two papers focus on the compound levulinic acid, which is formed, along with formic acid, when six-carbon sugars are reacted with acids. The levulinic acid can undergo a hydrogenation reaction to form γ-valeroactone (GVL), at which point the two papers diverged.
Bond's team proposed a method that would eliminate CO2 from the GVL in water, giving a mixture of isomeric butenes; these can be linked together, or oligimerized, into longer hydrocarbons and be used directly as fuels. As an added bonus, this process is carried out at a pressure where the CO2 could be reused in other reactions or ready made for sequestration without the need for an expensive compression step.
Lange's team, on the other hand, reacted GVL to form valeric acid (VA) with fairly high completion and selectivity. The VA could then be combined with various alcohols to form Valerate esters. Low molecular weight esters (up to propyl) were found to be suitable gasoline additives, working at 10 to 20 percent by volume. Higher weight esters could act either as a diesel additive or as diesel fuel itself.
The letter acknowledges that there are "technology development" hurdles that must be overcome before either of these processes go into production, let alone steal the spotlight from bioethanol. Even in the face of the challenges, the letter argues that these are promising demonstrations that biofuel stocks can produce intermediates that can be directly inserted into our existing petrochemical plants and processes. The perspective concludes with the hope that such research will spur the use of renewables as a replacement for our limited supply of petrochemical raw materials.
Science,
2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1191662
Bond et al.: Science,
2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1184362
Lange et al.: Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.,
2010. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201000655
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StarCraft 2 is a full game, no matter what whiners say
The Internet, taken as a sort of buzzing collective, can be hard on games. The Amazon ratings for StarCraft 2 have become a battlefield, with many rating the game based on features that gamers feel should have been included, or trashing the game because it's only one-third of the full release; the Zerg and Protoss sections of the campaign will be released at some point in the future. Looking at Blizzard's history with shipping games, we feel safe assuming that it won't be a matter of months.
The question is a good one: is StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty a hobbled experience, cracked into three parts in order to feed the chubby god of Activision's bottom line? We're still spending hours each day playing the game to get ready for the full review on Sunday, but we have thoughts on the matter we're ready to share now.
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Google in the clear over UK WiFi snooping
The Information Commissioner's Office has said that Google did not grab "significant" amounts of personal data when photographing the UK with its StreetView cars, and that the information captured is unlikely to include "meaningful personal details" or information that could be linked to an "identifiable person."
In its statement, the ICO said that Google was "wrong" to collect the information, but that ultimately, there was no evidence that the data collected could cause any "individual detriment."
The advertising and search company is being investigated around the world after it emerged that its StreetView cars were recording data from WiFi networks. The company claims that the logging of data was accidental, and that its intent was only to record public information such as access point names and MAC addresses to allow approximate non-GPS-based positioning services.
The ICO said that it would continue to monitor the other investigations into the company to see if they find that Google has broken any data privacy laws—including another investigation in the UK by the Metropolitan Police.
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Windows 7 trounces Windows XP at green computing
Mindteck, a company that offers embedded software development and consultancy services, has released power consumption data after testing sleep, idle, low-use, and high-use scenarios of various Windows PCs. The researchers also built a model to estimate cost savings (pictured above) by using a centralized power management policy. What really piqued our interest, though, was that Mindteck looked at the effect of processor chipset drivers on the power consumption (in watts) of Windows XP and Windows 7 with varying driver configurations and older hardware:
Power consumption (Watts) OS Windows XP Windows 7 Percent improvement PC Configuration Idle Low High Idle Low High Idle Low High P4 Updated Drivers 64.2 69.7 89.8 57.3 66.1 79.4 10.75 5.1611.58 P4 Out-of-box 64.2 68.7 106.2 57.3 66.1 79.4 10.75 3.78 25.24 High-end Updated Drivers 47.2 48.0 67.7 45.2 49.1 66.8 4.14 2.29 1.33 High-end Out-of-box 50.5 54.3 78.0 45.2 49.1 66.8 10.50 9.54 14.36As you can see, the results favor Windows 7 in every single scenario. The out-of-box differences are particularly high. For Windows 7, the consumption levels are actually the same as with the updated drivers—this means that Windows 7 is taking care of the chipset drivers, even on older hardware. The same cannot be said for Windows XP, and even with updated drivers (obtained manually), it still performs worse than Windows 7.
The whitepaper actually focuses on explaining how to "maximize the impact of effective power management with Windows 7," but the comparison to Windows XP was included in the appendix. Mindteck Smart Energy analysts quantified power consumption on five basic hardware platforms: a high-end desktop such as those used in engineering design or media processing, both a business desktop and business laptop, a Pentium 4 class business desktop to investigate prior-generation hardware, and a netbook. If you've already rolled out Windows 7 in your company, or are planning to, the 11-page report should help your CIOs and IT managers alike learn about leveraging Windows 7 to implement a comprehensive power management strategy. Check it out at the link below.
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HTC Droid Incredible parts cost $163.35
Mozilla's Tab Candy is the first step to sweeter browsing
Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.
As more software shifts into the cloud and users increase their reliance on the browser for daily computing tasks, browser tabs will have to evolve from a primitive mechanism for switching between documents into a full-blown task management system. The mainstream browser vendors have been slow to address this issue and haven't applied much innovation to the problem over the past few years. Mozilla has stepped up to plate and is aiming to hit the ball out of the park with some unique and truly compelling improvements to the tab concept.
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