Cingular Wireless leads the mobile phone industry in FCC complaints per 100,000 customers according to data released by the Wall Street Journal. GeekCoffee believes that this is due to the complexities brought on by the Cingular/AT&T merger, and hopes that Cingular can improve. Competition is healthy especially in the mobile market which seems to be dominated quality-wise by Verizon Wireless, who tallied the lowest number of complaints in the report.
Complaints to the FCC against each national carrier per 100,000 customers:
Randomly Generated Paper from MIT Accepted to Conference
Students at MIT seem to have exposed some rather humorous flaws in the acceptance of a randomly generated paper to WMSCI 2005. The program they developed to create the paper, dubbed "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator", generates random computer science papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations.
The paper, titled "Rooter - A Methodology of the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy", contained such paragraphs as the following:
"The model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."
The students are currently requesting donations to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk to go along with their randomly generated paper.
IBM will begin installing a "Smart Box" system in vehicles in the United Arab Emirates next year, potentially generating millions in traffic fines for the Gulf state.
The UAE signed a $125 million contract with IBM today to provide the high-tech traffic monitoring and speed-enforcing system in which a GPS-enabled "Smart Box" would be installed in cars to provide a voice warning if the driver exceeds the local speed limit for wherever he may be driving. If the voice warning is ignored, the system would use a GSM/GPRS link to beam the car's speed, identity and location to the police so that a ticket could be issued. The system would also track and monitor any other driving violations, including "reckless behavior."
"Tens of thousands" of vehicles will have the boxes installed next year, but UAE officials have not yet clarified whether installation of the device will be mandatory. The UAE is no stranger to automated enforcement. It currently has a network of 20 red light and speed cameras which carry tough penalties -- six individuals have been imprisoned for transgressions caught on film.
IBM developed Smart Box with UAE University last year.
Although the new dual-core Opteron server processors from AMD won't be officially announced until Thursday, pricing details have already begun to leak out. According to sources, the base Opteron 865 chip will be priced at $1,514.
The dual-core Opteron 870 will be priced at $2,149, with the Opteron 875 priced at $2,649. AMD's target market for these processors is high end servers, although one large manufacturer has already said they will not use the chip.
Although the 50 million download mark of Firefox is still a long way away, Opera Software has racked up 2 million downloads in the 2 weeks that the new Opera 8 Web Browser has been out. Opera is happy with the result, saying that the numbers showed that their browser is being welcomed by internet users worldwide.
The English version accounted for 1.3 million downloads, while the German version came in second with almost 400,000 downloads according to the company. "Considering Opera's last version, Opera 7, accumulated more than 60 million downloads, the successful launch of Opera 8 in April 2005 reflects that even higher download figures await for Opera," said Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner in a statement.
Bluetooth and UWB to Work Together on High-Speed Standard
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group said earlier this week that it intends to work with the Ultra-Wideband WiMedia Alliance and the UWB Forum to combine the strength of both technologies to emerge as the leading technology to transfer large files and data between mobile devices. They plan to put together the physical layers of Ultra-Wideband technology with the logic and higher level components of Bluetooth to achieve higher data transfer rates.
Though they are still working out details for the architecture of the final product, they maintain that backward Bluetooth compatibility is one of the essential aspects of the design.
Current Bluetooth technology can deliver a bandwidth of around 1Mbps over 30 feet, while the next version of Bluetooth will be able to offer 3Mbps at the same distance. Ultra-Wideband, in comparison, allows speeds of 100Mbps and higher.
The Gartner Group has reported that global sales of PDAs have rebounded to record levels in the first quarter of this year, up 25% to 3.4 million units. In contrast to analyst expectations predicting a slow death of handhelds, the statistics show that RIM's Blackberry is now the world's top selling handheld device, with a market share of 20.8%. PalmOne dropped to 18% from the 30.5% it had just a year earlier.
As far as software, Windows Mobile rose from 42.2% to 46% market share, while Palm dropped off sharply from 40.9% to 20%. Gartner’s explanation is that growth in PDAs is now being driven by interest in wireless connectivity, which matured noticeably during 2004. As these models tend to be expensive, it also helped boost the average selling price by 15 percent to a record $406 per PDA.
"PDAs with integrated wireless local area network (LAN) or cellular capabilities accounted for approximately 55 percent of all PDAs shipped in the first quarter of 2005," said Gartner’s Todd Kort.
The ICANN has begun commercial and technical discussions to bring a .xxx TLD for websites with adult content in order to protect children and families away from sites with objectionable content. Websites that register the domain will be expected to prevent marketing to children, to protect privacy of its users, block any malicious code, avoid the use of misleading site names and provide accurate meta tags.
ICM Registry said that Internet users should be able to make their own decisions about what they view on the Web, and that this domain is an important step in this direction. It added that voluntary regulation by the adult industry is preferable to government interference.
Recently, the ICANN has had several TLD submissions including .cat, .post, .mobi, .asia, .tel and .mail. The TLD, expected to be available in 2006, will cost $60 to register an address.
Strategic communications firm Capstrat has been up to quite the project lately. With Elvis week coming up from August 8th through the 16th, they have taken up the task of creating an image of the King with Post-It notes in their conference room. Quite the entertaining Flash presentation. You can view it on Capstrat's website. We can't come up with a better use for 2,646 Post-It notes either.
An open source rating system called Business Readiness Ratings (BRR) has been proposed to enable to the open source community to rate software in an open and standardized way. The initiative is being sponsored by many industry players, including Intel, O'Reilly, SpikeSource and the Carnegie Mellon West Center for Open Source Investigation.
From the website:
BRR will give companies a trusted, unbiased source for determining whether the open source software they are considering is mature enough to adopt. There are over 100,000 open source projects listed on SourceForge, CodeHaus, Tigris, Java.net and Open Symphony. Some widely adopted projects have become high-quality software suitable for mission critical production environments. Many others are less mature and pose potential risks. Today, companies evaluate open source suitability based on homegrown assessment methods without access to useful assessment data or methods.
The ultimate goal of BRR is to give companies a trusted, unbiased source for determining whether the open source software they are considering is mature enough to adopt. It will help adopters assess which open source software is best suited to their needs and enable them to share findings with the community. It promotes use and adoption of open source software and may assist developers in creating and delivering software geared to enterprise use.
If you're a reader of the popular ComputerWorld magazine, you have most likely seen the article published in last week's version stating that by 2010, techies will be all but obsolete in light of the technology 'versatilist'. This person would theoretically have very little technical skill and a good amount of business skill, and be able to manage the IT infrastructure.
On the surface, this may look plausible, but the article below gives a good argument about the last time this prediction came around. Remember the dot-com boom?
Want to be $1 million richer? Netflix is offering $1 million to the person who gives the best ideas on how to perfect the company's Cinematch movie-recommendation system, which predicts whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much they liked or disliked other movies they rented.
According to Netflix.com, "We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works."
The contest is already running, and will continue through at least October 2, 2011. Yep, that's right--until 2011!! So it'll be awhile until you'll actually have a chance to win that million dollars.
But $1 million isn't all you could win. Netflix is also offering a $50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. "It goes to the team whose system we judge shows the most improvement over the previous year’s best accuracy bar on the same qualifying test set. No improvement, no prize. And like the Grand Prize, to win you’ll need to share your method with us and describe it for the world."
Maybe the lawyers have already thought about it. Maybe Apple has given their blessing, who knows. Does Apple's domain over the word 'pod' only extend over the computer and digital music industries? It doesn't look so, as other non-related companies have been approached over the issue. Anyone that knows, feel free to comment. :)
For the future, if this comes up: Burger King, I owe you twice what everyone else pays for the rest of my life. And Apple, you owe me a new iPod for the rest of my life.
Just an update on the PS3 release front, the latest victim of all of our obcession is Costco. Releasing a PS3 premium bundle with a game and an extra controller for $699.99, not only did they sell out in 3 minutes, but the site is down. On to the next one! And no, we still haven't been able to get our hands on one.
With the release of the PS3 on Friday, the site SmashMyPS3 has been getting a lot of press lately. They purchased a PS3 and did what you see above to it. Trying to make a living through advertisements like a lot of bloggers, it makes me wonder whether the press and hits the site got made it worth it to destroy a $600+ PlayStation.
I would imagine so, as we've had a few $600 days in our existence from Adsense earnings. It took over 25,000 hits to get there, so I'm sure they made it worth their time. See below for a video of the carnage.
Our friends at Blendtec are at it again with the latest in the Will It Blend series - this time the victim is the much-desired iPhone. If you love the iPhone, make sure you don't have a weak stomach. If you hate the iPhone, click on for some blending goodness!
Looking for a way to have a numeric keypad and a mouse on your laptop while you're out? If you are, we're sure this isn't the way you want to do it. Nonetheless, this has got to be one of the more creative things we've seen come across the desk lately.
A mouse with the flip top down, and a numeric keypad when you flip the top up! Interesting...
