Google has received federal approval for its purchase of travel software company ITA. Google has faced intense scrutiny over the sale from the government as well as from the competition, like Microsoft Bing and Expedia. But it's not a free-for-all, Google will have to adhere to some fairly strict guidelines.
The settlement with the DOJ would require El Goog to use ITA's technology to develop travel software, and continue to fund development in the travel software industry. ITA's existing airfare search engine would need to remain available to Google's competition for a reasonable fee as well. To really drive the point home, the DOJ threatened an antitrust lawsuit should Google pass on the settlement.
Google's goal is to integrate flight information into search results. Users would be able to search for flights, prices, and other conditions to get a list of available tickets. It's yet another effort to keep users on Google sites, instead of just linking off to other services. Do you think Google's purchase of ITA will harm competition?
The champagne corks must be popping at Redmond today. According to stat tracking group Pingdom, Windows 7 usage just passed Windows XP in the US. Of all operating systems, XP use is still at 31.56%, but Windows 7 has vaulted to 31.71%. It's about time.
The data comes from aggregated visits to over 3 million websites, meaning that it offers a solid cross sample of machines. Usage of Windows 7 has been on a steep rise ever since the OS was debuted. A refreshing change from Vista, which never got close to XP's market share level.
In many ways, this was inevitable. As old computers break down, people replace them with whatever is current. But we would wager that Windows 7 has also smoothed over many of the hurt feelings from Vista in general. The US joins other countries like the UK, Australia and France that have already hit this milestone. So, hands up if you're still on XP.
Verizon Wireless has confirmed today that as of April 17th, customers will no longer have the option of signing up for 1-year contracts. According to Big Red, the change is being made to simplify choices and because most people choose the 2-year option with larger phone subsidy anyway. Mont-to-month, prepaid, and 2-year contracts are continuing unchanged.
The 1-year contract option was popular among power users who liked the freedom of getting a new, subsidized phone every year. In many cases, Verizon's 1-year handset prices were only slightly more expensive than the 2-year ones. But no more. Starting on the 17th, new sign-ups and renewing users will either pay full price, or take the 2-year subsidy.
Have you ever used the 1-year contract option on your carrier? Would you do it again (unless you're on Verizon)?
We finally got to spend some time in our brand new video studio, where I was given my first opportunity to ever to use a green screen during a shoot, and my 1,156th (don't quote me there) opportunity to make an ass out of myself on camera.
All joking aside, dropping an image seamlessly over a green screen was actually a bit harder than we had anticipated, as you'll see in some slight hiccups in the video. But it was a learning experience, and we're excited to find new and fun ways to utilize the studio moving forward. But, for now, here's us acting like idiots in front of a green screen. Enjoy!
Have yourselves a fantastic weekend everyone, we'll see ya' next week.
Feel like fragging a fraking toaster? Of course you do. You could wait for the inevitable Cylon uprising (this has all happened before, after all), or you can suit up grab a Viper and get you some with Battlestar Galactica Online, our Cool Site of the Week.
Currently in open beta, Battlestar Galactica Online is a browser-based 3D tactical space shooter with content pulled from everyone's favorite space opera of the past few years. Players can take on the role of either a Colonial or Cylon fighter pilot. At the time we tried this bad boy out, the game's developers--Bigpoint--were rewarding players who rolled a Cylon with 50% additional experience for ten days. Now there's some social commentary for you: Even in a world as messed up as this one is, overwhelming numbers of fighter jockeys still want to fly for the good guys. After selecting a faction (we chose to flight for the Colonials, extra experience be damned), you'll be sent on a brief training missing, which see you quickly move from taking down a few target dummies to participating in a full blown fire fight.
As you progress through the game, you'll encounter a number of familiar faces from the TV series, be sent on a wide variety of combat missions and be given the opportunity to make microtransactions to improve your character's combat capabilities. Not too shabby for a free browser-based application.
Be sure to check back every Friday for another edition of Cool Site of the Week.
When the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was introduced in 1946 as a tool for calculating the trajectory of artillery shells, it made headlines nationwide as the first all-electronic computer. But there was little mention of Jean Jennings Bartik and the other women who programmed the machine, charting new territory by converting math into a nascent machine language.
Bartik, who died last month and is on the right in the above photo, graduated from Northwest Missouri State University (then Northwest Missouri State Teachers College) with a degree in math and responded to an Army ad for a wartime project at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. There, along with Frances Elizabeth Holberton, she lead a small team of women programmers at a time when no one even really knew what programming was.
The ENIAC, which used thousands of vacuum tubes, diodes, relays, resistors and capacitors to perform complex arithmetic calculations, was a thousand times faster than the part-electronic, part-mechanical machines that preceded it. Bartik and her team developed the system for translating those mathematical problems into a configuration for the ENIAC's myriad cables and switches.
Bartik worked on the UNIVAC, an early commercial computer, throughout the rest of the decade, leaving the industry in 1951 and returning to work as a programmer from 1967 into the mid-80s, when she was laid off. She worked as a real estate agent for the next 25 years, unable to find work in programming, though in recent years she and her team have rightfully been recognized as pioneers by the computer science community. The ENIAC represented an unparalleled jump computational power—one that no breakthrough has matched since. Jean Bartik and the rest of the ENIAC women were instrumental in making that historic leap.
Gizmodo is the world's most fun technology website, focused on gadgets and how they make our lives better, worse, and more absurd.
Been putting off building that new system until the next generation of SATA III solid state drives start shipping? Well, you can stop dreaming and start building. OCZ this week announced that it's begun shipping its new Vertex 3 SATA III SSDs to its reseller network, so if you can't find one in stock now, you soon should be able to.
"The Vertex 3 series with the SandForce SF-2200 SSD processor has been eagerly anticipated in the marketplace," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology Group. "Our partnership with SandForce has again facilitated the introduction of a solution that sets the benchmark for industry leading performance and reliability."
Armed with SandForce's new controller technology, the Vertex 3 line boasts up to 550MB/s of bandwidth and 60,000 IOPS (4k random write). The Vertex 3 line is available in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities.
At the time of this writing, Newegg shows the 480GB model as in stock, though that will set you back $1,900. Lower capacity Vertex 3 drives are listed on Newegg's product page but are currently out of stock. With this latest announcement, we expect that to change within the next few days.
The 'Mobile Digital TV' movement is swinging into full force "with an eye on future capabilities such as electronic coupons, video-on-demand, and real-time integration with social media," according to the Open Video Coalition. For this reason, Mobile DTV is a major focus at this year's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, with few companies as active as LG.
"As mobile digital television broadcasts ramp up this year, the television receiver of the future will fit in the palm of your hand and do much more than just deliver breaking news, weather alerts, and favorite shows," LG says. "In fact, the very digital TV broadcasting system used to deliver today's information and entertainment programming to mobile devices can also deliver up-to-the second social networking updates, engaging three-dimensional (3D) telecasts, and electronic coupons that would help eliminate the need to clip or print out coupons."
Sounds ambitious, but LG feels up to the task with a handful of new products on display. One of those is what LG claims is the first mobile digital TV that displays 3D images broadcast via the ATSC Mobile DTV Standard. Currently in prototype form, this device is a 7-inch receiver with auto-stereoscopic capability that doesn't require any special eye gear, like passive or active shutter 3D glasses.
LG is also showing off its first Android-enabled smartphone prototype with Mobile Digital TV reception. It offers conditional access functionality for future subscription broadcasts and can receive both non real-time data, like electronic coupons, and real-time data reception with applications like Tweet-TV.
Tweet-TV, in case you're wondering, is a mobile DTV app that allows viewer tweets to be displayed interactively on a mobile DTV receiver while a program is airing. These tweets are displayed in a transparent panel over part of the LG mobile DTV screen.
XFX doubles the fan and juices the clock speed of the HD 6950
The original Radeon HD 6950 cards shipped with a 2GB frame buffer, and you can still get those if you want. But some manufacturers have begun shipping the HD 6950 with 1GB of video memory, which is a fine fit for the current generation of 1080p displays.
XFX has taken the 1GB 6950 a step further, juicing up both the GPU and memory clocks and adding a custom cooler that XFX says will keep the card cooler and run more quietly than the default AMD-designed cooler. The new cooler uses a pair of propeller-bladed fans that turn more slowly than the paddle wheel fan in the reference cooling system.
The XXX Edition's core clock speed is 830MHz, almost 4 percent over the 800MHz reference clock; the 1,300MHz memory is clocked about 8 percent over the reference 1,200MHz memory frequency. The XXX Edition has the usual set of outputs, including a pair of DVI connectors (one of which is only single-link), one HDMI 1.4a port, and a pair of Mini DisplayPort connections. The logical competition for this card (given its price point and features) is a card like MSI's N560GTX-Ti, built around Nvidia's GTX 560 Ti GPU.
The dual fans on XFX's Radeon HD 6950 push more air and make less noise than the single fan on the reference model.
The Radeon has the edge over the GeForce card in texture units (88 to the GTX 560 Ti's 64) and memory clocks (1,300MHz versus 1,050MHz), but the MSI GTX 560 Ti card costs less—by around $40. What we care about most, though, is how the card performs—not how it looks on paper. We popped the XFX card into our standard graphics test system and hammered on it with our benchmark suite.
As you can see, the XFX card fared a bit better than the MSI card on average, though the MSI N560GTX-Ti card scored a few wins of its own. The XFX card uses a touch more power at idle, but a little less when running flat out. The XXX Edition seems a little quieter than the reference HD 6950, but you can still hear the dual fans spin up under load. The frequency of that noise isn't as annoying as the stock fan's noise, though.
Is the XFX card worth $40 more? Part of that price difference is due to the XFX limited lifetime warranty, which is transferable if you resell the card. Ultimately, it depends on what you want in a graphics card. If you're just playing PC games on a single 1080p display, the 560 Ti is a great choice. If you want more than two displays and a little more juice in your gaming, then go for the HD 6950 XXX Edition. $290, www.xfxforce.com
Fair warning for anyone who plans to travel outside the country. Upon re-entry into the U.S., border agents have full authority to seize your laptop, netbook, tablet PC, and other electronic components without a warrant, but that's not all. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that border agents also have the power to send your confiscated electronics to an offsite location for forensic inspection.
Network World says this is the second such ruling in less than a year empowering the U.S. government to conduct offsite searches of digital devices without a warrant. The first ruling came in a court in Michigan last May.
As you might imagine, none of this sits well with privacy advocates. The American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) says that according to government documents, U.S. customs officials searched electronic devices belonging to some 6,600 travelers between October 2008 and June 2010, and confiscated more than 220 devices between October 2008 and June 2009.
Not long after T-Mobile officially announced its soon-to-be-released G2x smartphone built by LG, which will be available online starting April 15 and in stores April 20 for $200 (after $50 mail-in-rebate and with an obligatory two-year service agreement), someone listed a purportedly fully functioning model on Ebay. The seller tagged the G2x with a Buy-It-Now price of $1,000, and though it didn't quite go for that much, he did manage to find a buyer willing to overpay.
The G2x sold for $799, though hey, at least the seller was willing to throw in free expedited shipping. Where or how the seller got his hands on the unreleased smartphone isn't known, though if he's an employee of T-Mobile, he did a poor job of covering his tracks by failing to block the IMEI and other identifying information in the included pics.
Regardless of all that, the G2x is one of the more anticipated smartphones coming to T-Mobile. It sports a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor from Nvidia, 4-inch capacitive touchscreen, 8MP rear-facing camera, 1.3MP front-facing camera, 8GB of internal storage, microSD card slot with support for up to 32GB, 1080p TV-out via HDMI, and a 1500 mAh battery. It looks to be a nifty Android device for a wireless carrier that hasn't had much to be excited about, but if another one tips up on Ebay for $800-$1,000, our advice is to wait until it's released next week.
It's getting to be that time of month again. Microsoft's 'Patch Tuesday' is just around the corner for April 2011, and saying it's a big one doesn't do justice to the enormity of the upcoming update. Microsoft is planning to roll out fixes for 64 flaws this coming Tuesday, making this the biggest Patch Tuesday update in the company's history. The previous record was 49 vulnerabilities set in October 2010.
Microsoft is cramming the 64 fixes into 17 security bulletins. Nine of them are labeled as "Critical" and the remaining eight are deemed "Important." The updates affect several versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and GDI+.
If you're an IT manager, get ready for a fun week. Several of the updates require a restart while all the rest "may require a restart," according to Microsoft's Advance Notification. It's also worth mentioning that almost all of the updates deal with remote code execution.
It's bad enough that in most cases, if you want to enjoy 3D content, you need to slap on a pair of goofy looking 3D glasses. There's just no way to look hip while wearing 3D eye gear, and adding insult to injury, active shutter glasses are flipping expensive. It's kind of like going to an overpriced barber shop and walking out with a bad haircut. Thanks to Samsung, expensive 3D glasses might just become a thing of the past.
Samsung this week announced a new promotion that will make household 3D a little more affordable. For starters, anyone who purchases a Samsung 3D LED TV or 3D plasma TV beginning April 24 with receive two pairs of 3D active shutter glasses for free. That's a fair deal if you're single or live with a roommate or significant other, but what about families?
Beginning May 1, 2011, Samsung will slash the price of its 2011 model SSG-3100GB 3D glasses to less than $50, down from their currently selling price of $130. Combined with the above promotion, it will be possible to equip a family of four with 3D glasses for less than $100, or less than what a single pair goes for today.
"We are excited to make it even more affordable for the entire family to enjoy Samsung's lifelike 3D experience," said John Revie, senior vice president of Home Entertainment, Samsung America. "Reaching new audiences with the wonder of Samsung's Full HD 3D is key to driving continued adoption of 3D in the home."
Samsung's 3D active glasses do not require charging and will provide up to 70 hours of use from the included replaceable battery, Samsung says.
Depending on which market research firm you believe is the most accurate, Microsoft's total usage share for all versions of Windows ranges from about 84 percent to more than 91 percent. Microsoft is the largest software company on the planet with a market capitalization of over $220 billion, which is more than the GDP of Egypt and dozens of other countries. None of that means anything to Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation.
"I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy."
Zemlin's stance isn't based on Microsoft's dominance on the home desktop, but in almost every other market, and especially server-side computing and mobile, he says.
"I think that on the 20th anniversary, it's worth reflecting back on where we came from," Zemlin said in an an interview with Network World. He points out that Linux had a "humble start as a project for a college student in Helsinki, to something today that runs 70 percent of global equity trading, something that powers, really, the majority of Internet traffic, whether it's Facebook, Google, or Amazon."
Look around and you'll find Linux everywhere, both online and offline. A whole host of CE devices run Linux, from TVs to smartphones, to tablets and eBook readers like the Kindle. The big exception is desktops, where Windows still dominates. But does it matter?
"Today people use smartphones more, in many ways, than they may use their traditional PCs," Zemlin said. "In that case, Linux really does have dominant market share through things like Android or other versions of Linux that are out there in the mobile space."
While the full swarm of Honeycomb tablets buzzes further off on the horizon, a few scouts are arriving to test the hospitableness of the consumer environment. Sales of the Motorola Xoom have been sluggish so far, and it may be due to a price that does little to sway potential iPad 2 buyers. The latest experiment in Honeycomb tablet market penetration, the Acer Iconia Tab A500, arrives today at BestBuy.com for pre-orders at a tantalizing sub-iPad price of $449.99 (Wi-Fi only; no 3G/4G data). Pre-orders at Best Buy stores will begin on April 14, and the final onsale date will be April 24 -- exclusively at Best Buy stores and online.
The 10.1-inch Iconia Tab A500 comes loaded with a Tegra 250 dual-core 1GHz processor with integrated GeForce GPU, which Acer promises will be boss for HD gaming (Need for Speed: Shift and Let's Golf included), 1080p video and snappy browsing. With an aluminum casing, the tablet weighs about 1.7 pounds with a thickness of about a half inch. It carries 16GB of internal memory and supports Micro-SD cards up to 32GB. Acer reports 8 hours of battery life for casual gaming or HD video playback, and 10 hours for Wi-Fi Internet browsing.
Among the other tablet-standard features are built-in GPS and Bluetooth, HDMI output, ambient light sensor, accelerometer, 5MP rear camera with flash and autofocus and 2MP front-facing webcam. Acer notes that the Iconia Tab A500 will support Flash but will not come with it pre-installed.
Many of the images below are clearly 3D-render graphics, which don't really give us an idea of how the 1280x800 TFT WXGA display looks or whether the claim of an 80-degree wide viewing angle holds up. Still, we're curious to see how the A500 performs, are you?
Talk about technology coming full circle. Earlier this week, Commodore USA announced it was reviving the Commodore 64 with a replica model updated with modern components, and now Atari has gone and dumped a collection of 100 classic Atari games into the iTunes Store. It includes 18 classic Atari arcade games, including the ever-popular Pong, as well as 92 Atari 2600 games.
The obvious downside here is that you need an iOS device to play them, such as an iPhone or iPad. The upshot for those that own one is that there are 25 separate packs available for download at $0.99/each, or you can buy all 100 games at a discounted price of $14.99.
Granted none of the included titles are likely as fun as you remember them being, but $15 for 100 games worth of nostalgia is not a bad price, especially since it comes with original cabinet and box art. Hopefully Atari has the good sense to re-release the same collection on Android.
We're not entirely sure what's up with Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S II smartphone, and apparently neither is Samsung. Earlier this week, Samsung Mobile India stated in a Twitter post that there's a delay in the global launch of the Galaxy S II and not to expect shipments until at least June. Samsung went on to say that "it's not just India, but it's delayed all over." Disappointing, but accurate? Perhaps not.
After news of the delay spread like wildfire on the Internet, Samsung posted a couple of follow up tweets refuting the delays.
"[Notice 1/2] Samsung Galaxy S II will be first released in April, as planned," the first tweet read. A second tweet states, "[Notice 2/2] It will be gradually rolled out in each market according to the local launch timetable."
So what does it all mean? Unfortunately, all we can gather from this is that the Galaxy S II will launch when it will launch. When it does, we're hoping it still comes with the upgraded 1.2GHz dual-core processor that was announced earlier this week, though we're reluctant to get our hopes up on anything until Samsung issues an official press release.
Anonymous doesn't support things like normal people do. No bake sales, charity walks, or long-winded, short-tempered message board flame wars. Anonymous has only one speed, and it's a picture of someone's exposed throat. That much was obvious in the shadowy conglomerate's recent defense of PS3 hacker George "Geohot" Hotz, which resulted in PlayStation Network outages almost instantaneously. Now, though, Anonymous has decided to back off. Sony, it seems, has survived the battle, but Anonymous was quick to add that the war's far from over.
"We realize that targeting the PSN is not a good idea. We have therefore temporarily suspended our action, until a method is found that will not severely impact Sony customers," the group said on its news site.
"Anonymous is on your side, standing up for your rights. We are not aiming to attack customers of Sony. This attack is aimed solely at Sony, and we will try our best to not affect the gamers, as this would defeat the purpose of our actions. If we did inconvenience users, please know that this was not our goal."
And, of course, who could forget the Anon offshoot that's popping off shots at individual employees? "OpSony," as the main group is known, was quick to clarify that the offshoot is just that. Two sides of the same coin, perhaps, but one's a president and the other's a half-melted piece of chocolate.
Sony, meanwhile, has significantly revised its stance on the matter – going from "er, um, uh nothing to see here; move along" to considering "the possibility of targeted behavior of an outside party."
"If this is indeed caused by such act, we want to once again thank our customers who have borne the brunt of the attack through interrupted service. Our engineers are working to restore and maintain the services, and we appreciate our customers' continued support," said the console-maker.
So, that's that – for now. Obviously, however, this is far from over. Fingers crossed that cooler heads prevail, because we've seen Anon in "stirred hornet's nest" mode and Sony in "you get a lawsuit, you get a lawsuit, and you get a lawsuit" mode. Put those two together, and it won't be pretty.
Google has 
Verizon Wireless has confirmed today that as of April 17th, customers will
Feel like fragging a fraking toaster? Of course you do. You could wait for the inevitable Cylon uprising (this has all happened before, after all), or you can suit up grab a Viper and get you some with 
As you progress through the game, you'll encounter a number of familiar faces from the TV series, be sent on a wide variety of combat missions and be given the opportunity to make microtransactions to improve your character's combat capabilities. Not too shabby for a free browser-based application. 
Been putting off building that new system until the next generation of SATA III solid state drives start shipping? Well, you can stop dreaming and start building. OCZ this week announced that it's begun shipping its new Vertex 3 SATA III SSDs to its reseller network, so if you can't find one in stock now, you soon should be able to.
The 'Mobile Digital TV' movement is swinging into full force "with an eye on future capabilities such as electronic coupons, video-on-demand, and real-time integration with social media," according to the Open Video Coalition. For this reason, Mobile DTV is a major focus at this year's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, with few companies as active as LG.
Fair warning for anyone who plans to travel outside the country. Upon re-entry into the U.S., border agents have full authority to seize your laptop, netbook, tablet PC, and other electronic components without a warrant, but that's not all. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that border agents also have the power to send your confiscated electronics to an offsite location for forensic inspection.
Not long after T-Mobile officially announced its soon-to-be-released G2x smartphone built by LG, which will be available online starting April 15 and in stores April 20 for $200 (after $50 mail-in-rebate and with an obligatory two-year service agreement), someone listed a purportedly fully functioning model on Ebay. The seller tagged the G2x with a Buy-It-Now price of $1,000, and though it didn't quite go for that much, he did manage to find a buyer willing to overpay.
It's getting to be that time of month again. Microsoft's 'Patch Tuesday' is just around the corner for April 2011, and saying it's a big one doesn't do justice to the enormity of the upcoming update. Microsoft is planning to roll out fixes for 64 flaws this coming Tuesday, making this the biggest Patch Tuesday update in the company's history. The previous record was 49 vulnerabilities set in October 2010.
It's bad enough that in most cases, if you want to enjoy 3D content, you need to slap on a pair of goofy looking 3D glasses. There's just no way to look hip while wearing 3D eye gear, and adding insult to injury, active shutter glasses are flipping expensive. It's kind of like going to an overpriced barber shop and walking out with a bad haircut. Thanks to Samsung, expensive 3D glasses might just become a thing of the past.
Depending on which market research firm you believe is the most accurate, Microsoft's total usage share for all versions of Windows ranges from about 84 percent to more than 91 percent. Microsoft is the largest software company on the planet with a market capitalization of over $220 billion, which is more than the GDP of Egypt and dozens of other countries. None of that means anything to Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation.
While the full swarm of Honeycomb tablets buzzes further off on the horizon, a few scouts are arriving to test the hospitableness of the consumer environment. Sales of the Motorola Xoom have been sluggish so far, and it may be due to a price that does little to sway potential iPad 2 buyers. The latest experiment in Honeycomb tablet market penetration, the Acer Iconia Tab A500, arrives today at BestBuy.com for pre-orders at a tantalizing sub-iPad price of $449.99 (Wi-Fi only; no 3G/4G data). Pre-orders at Best Buy stores will begin on April 14, and the final onsale date will be April 24 -- exclusively at Best Buy stores and online.
Talk about technology coming full circle. Earlier this week, Commodore USA announced it was reviving the Commodore 64 with a replica model updated with modern components, and now Atari has gone and dumped a collection of 100 classic Atari games into the iTunes Store. It includes 18 classic Atari arcade games, including the ever-popular Pong, as well as 92 Atari 2600 games.
We're not entirely sure what's up with Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S II smartphone, and apparently neither is Samsung. Earlier this week, Samsung Mobile India stated in a Twitter post that there's a delay in the global launch of the Galaxy S II and not to expect shipments until at least June. Samsung went on to say that "it's not just India, but it's delayed all over." Disappointing, but accurate? Perhaps not.
Anonymous doesn't support things like normal people do. No bake sales, charity walks, or long-winded, short-tempered message board flame wars. Anonymous has only one speed, and it's a picture of someone's exposed throat. That much was obvious in the shadowy conglomerate's recent 
