1-800-CONTACTS also protests that there is nothing “scandalous” about its CEO visiting Ditto’s site to check out its product. We agree. There is certainly nothing wrong with keeping tabs on the competition. What we do think is scandalous, however, is what the company did next. After checking out Ditto’s product, 1-800-CONTACTS apparently went out and purchased a patent in order to sue its competitor.
Deutsche Telekom to curb ADSL volumes
Germany’s national telco Deutsche Telekom is fighting back against OTT players using its broadband network for data-intense services like video-on-demand (VOD) portals without sharing their revenues by throttling the data rate to 384Kbit/s for ADSL and VDSL customers if they exceed the volume included in their tariff.
via Setback for OTT: Deutsche Telekom to curb ADSL volumes | Rapid TV News.
And so it begins….
Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor
Now, by plugging an EMI sensor into any wall socket, you can read your house’s EM signature — and if you continue to listen, you can detect changes in the signature. Obvious changes occur when a device is switched on or off, but it also turns out that simply moving your hand close to an LCD monitor also alters your house’s EM signature. It might sound a bit unbelievable, that a single finger moving towards an LCD monitor can be detected by a sensor at the other end of the house, but that’s exactly what the University of Washington researchers have accomplished.
via Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor | ExtremeTech.
T-Mobile No-contract Advertising: WA Court Orders Retraction
Under T-Mobile’s new setup, subscribers can purchase handsets by making a relatively small up-front payment and then paying the remaining cost of the phone over the following 24 months. For example, Apple’s iPhone 5 costs $99 down followed by 24 monthly payments of $20. While customers do not need to sign a standard contract committing them to T-Mobile’s wireless service for two years, they do have to sign an agreement taking responsibility for full equipment costs.
via T-Mobile No-contract Advertising: WA Court Orders Retraction | BGR.
Charging $(24×20) + $99 = $579 for an IPhone when you can get a decent tablet with a bigger screen and similar features for under $200 is ridiculous. It amazes me how people will complain when gas goes up a nickel a gallon but don’t think twice about over paying for cell phones by hundreds of dollars.
Does ‘Sarah Hanson’ exist? The story of this 19-year-old entrepreneur may be a hoax
The story, which was first-reported by VentureBeat and then by sites including Huffington Post, Yahoo! and AOL, was unique. Here was Hanson, a 19-year-old college student from Seattle, ditching the traditional college route and utilizing a silent auction site to help achieve her entrepreneurial dreams.
Now it looks like the story may have been too good to be true.
via Does ‘Sarah Hanson’ exist? The story of this 19-year-old entrepreneur may be a hoax – GeekWire.
Smartphones easily used to skim credit card data
The app used the near field communication (NFC) antenna built into the Galaxy SIII phone, a feature available on many phones running Google’s Android operating system. The antenna is normally used to allow two phones to talk to each other.
via Smartphones easily used to skim credit card data – Manitoba – CBC News.
Stop standardizing HTML
It is well past time, though, for the W3C and the browser vendors to stop talking as if they constrain the markup developers can use and focus instead on the many things they can do to make the browsers supporting that markup processing more capable. HTML’s legacy vocabulary is a great foundation on which developers can build their own toolsets. The Web will benefit, however, from letting developers solve their information problems in their own ways, rather than trying to stuff too many things into a single vocabulary.
Someone could have just made a ton of money hacking the AP’s Twitter account
Algorithmic trading bots react instantaneously to keywords in news reports and even tweets, which is likely why the market fell so quickly. Stocks started to recover about three minutes later but took seven minutes to return to their earlier levels.
via Someone could have just made a ton of money hacking the AP’s Twitter account – Quartz.
Chinese Restaurant Owner Says Robot Noodle Maker Doing “A Good Job!”
That humans can be replaced by robots that do the job faster and cheaper is an idea that now pervades Chinese employers. “Chinese companies usually start considering robots when the payment for a skilled worker exceeds 50,000 yuan ($8,060) a year,” Tan Xueke, a manager at the Xinsong Robot Automation Company in Shenynang, told Xinhua News Agency.
via Chinese Restaurant Owner Says Robot Noodle Maker Doing “A Good Job!” | Singularity Hub.
Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention
During the class in the spring of 2012 he learned the graphics programming language CUDA, and that opened the doors for tweaking GPUs to divide advanced computations across the GPUs massively parallel architecture.
He knew he had something when he wrote an algorithm to connect millions of points on a map, joining the data together spatially. The performance of his GPU-based computations compared to the same operation done with CPU power on PostGIS, the GIS module for the open-source database PostgreSQL, was “mind-blowing,” he said.
via Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention.