Well it looks like Verizon Wireless might end up ruling a little bit less of the air. The New York Times is reporting that VZW has reached a settlement to refund phantom data usage fees. The settlement could end up costing VZW up to $90 million in refunds and service credits. The lawsuit involved stemmed from user complaints about wireless data charges when the users did not subscribe to a data plan.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/technology/04webphone.html?src=busln
Well, it’s official folks. Research In Motion, a.k.a. RIM, the lovely people who have brought you many frustrating Blackberry products chocked full of trackballs, announced yesterday that they will be releasing a tablet touchscreen computer. Aimed to compete with the iPad and the new Samsung Galaxy, the RIM tablet, being called the Playbook for now, will feature a 1 GHz processor and a max resolution of 1024×600. The phone will be able to pair with Blackberry handsets via bluetooth to share data and a 3G connection. And most importantly, for the iPad haters, it will feature fully hardware accelerated Flash (YAY!). Look for it to be released sometime in Q1 2011.
Source:
Found this over at Mozilla Labs today…What an amazing concept video! I really think the dual projectors will be too costly though! Cool IR tracking though!
There seems to be a lot of confusion out there regarding the structure of the Linux File System. Why are certain programs located in /bin while others are in /sbin or /usr/bin? Why can I save files in one directory and not another? How can I tell where I should save my files and programs? Well, I hope to assist in clearing all of that up today!
First, let’s take a look at a graphical representation of the Linux File System:
The first thing we need to talk about is the root directory (/). It is the directory where all of the other directories in the file system are stored. The root user is the only one who can write to this directory. It is not to be confused with /root which is the root user’s home directory!
Within the root directory, you will find the following sub-directories. I have included some descriptions of each:
1. /bin
The /bin directory is for User Binaries. It is where many of the most common Linux commands are stored. Specifically, this is where the single user mode binaries are stored.
2. /sbin
This directory is almost exactly like the /bin directory, with one exception. The binaries here are primarily used by Administrators for system maintenance.
3. /etc
The configuration files for your programs and operating system are stored in /etc.
4. /dev
This is where all of the device files are located. For example, this is the directory that you would call to in order to mount a drive with a command like: mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/backup
5. /proc
The /proc directory is one of the most interesting in the whole Linux File System. It is actually its own virtual file system with a massive amount of text information about system processes.
6. /var
This is where all of the variable files are stored. Most commonly, this is where log files and web server files are stored.
7. /tmp
These are simply temporary files.
8. /usr
Programs installed by single users get stored here.
9. /home
This is where all of the user home directories are except for the root user’s home directory which is /root.
10. /boot
The files that make up the boot loader go in /boot. Everything from boot loader menus, to the actual kernel files are stored here.
11. /lib
All of the binary files that are located in /bin and /sbin are supported by the library files located in /lib.
12. /opt
/opt is short for “optional”. It is the directory where individual vendors can install optional add-on software for the operating system.
13. /mnt
The /mnt directory is the mount point that system administrators can use to mount file systems temporarily.
14. /media
The /media directory serves the same purpose as the /mnt directory except it is specifically for removable devices and can be used by non administrators.
15. /srv
The /srv directory contains server specific service files.
The next time you are writing up an HTML form, think twice before making the form fields align to the right or left of their labels. This can make a difference in how easy it is for your user to fill out the form. Here’s a great visualization that explains:
Daniel Carrillo is a writer, gamer, and all around gadget guy. We are excited to have his contributions to our blog. Keep your eyes peeled for his articles!
CEO of Google, Inc., Eric Schmidt said the company plans to make its Web TV services available to global consumers sometime next year.
The service will be launched for American consumers this fall through an agreement between Google and Sony Corp.
Google’s attempts to reach beyond the Web and the Search Engine market is nothing new. With the creation of the Android mobile operating system and Google TV leading the charge. Offering services to users on new devices may help the company lessen its dependence on search advertising, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue.
Google’s software for television will work with Intel Corp. chips in products by Sony and Logitech International SA. The service will include video-on-demand products from Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc. and Hulu, a video site partly owned by Walt Disney Co..
“There are no plans to monetize Google Web TV,” Brittany Bohnet, a product marketing representative at Google, said today. Google will continue to make money from advertising that appears in the browser, as is the case when consumers use the search engine on a computer or mobile phone. It will not charge manufacturers to use the software for Google Web TV, nor will it charge content providers that make their material available.
“Google TV pulls together a list of results from your TV line-up and free stuff on the Web, and additional on-demand video from for instance Amazon, on demand,” Bohnet said. Some content will be free and some will generate a charge, she said.
Of the 60,000 applications that are available for mobile phones running on the Android operating system, “thousands” will work on TV, she said. There will be applications designed specifically for television use.
Google has declined 25 percent in Nasdaq trading in New York this year. The stock fell 0.8 percent to $466.41 a share as of 10:55 a.m. New York time.
Privacy Concerns
At the Berlin conference, Schmidt addressed the company’s plans to take photos of homes and streets in Germany, which has met with resistance.
“We end up in the middle of these debates: about privacy, about Street View,” Schmidt said. “The debate is healthy. We encounter this scrutiny and we participate and accept it very much,” the CEO said.
German citizens will benefit from Street View, he said. “It’s a powerful product from an end-user perspective.”
Ilse Aigner, the country’s minister for consumer protection, in August asked the company to do more to weigh requests from citizens wishing to have their homes blocked from the service.
Regulators in the U.S., Spain, France Italy, and the Czech Republic have probed the company for details around Google Street View. Google said in May that it inadvertently collected information from open wireless networks.
Schmidt said he was “quite angry” about the collection of information and said it was “one engineer that did that.”
“Once we detected it, we knew it wasn’t authorized, we had an internal review and we notified the authorities,” he said.
Source: Bloomberg
Andy Helms shows his minimalist approach to remaking the movie posters for Star Wars Episode IV through VI. I appreciate that he didn’t bother with episodes I through III!
Some funny errors from the past! Do any of you miss Windows 95 and 98?
The first thing that you’ll want to do is go to the Wine Config and set Windows 2000 as the default app.
Next, enter the following into the command line:
wget http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks
Then enter:
sh winetricks corefonts dotnet20
And finally:
sh winetricks fakeie6
*- If you got an error about c://windows/ does not exist try to mount your drives
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