Jolla, the Finnish MeeGo startup comprised of ex-Nokians building their own mobile hardware and Sailfish OS, has finally taken the wraps off its first handset, revealing what the hardware will look like on its website. The design is a clean looking, elegant slab, with the most stand-out feature being the coloured shell on the back that wraps around half the sides of the phone. The shell colours, which appear to be user-customisable, can also influence the theme colours of the Sailfish UI. This is a feature Jolla is calling “the Other Half”. “Attach the Other Half and your Jolla becomes alive and unique,” the text notes. “Magically, the software changes to match your selected colour and design. Your Ambience. Your Jolla.” The removable, customisable shells bring to mind Nokia’s Lumia 820 — a device for which Nokia has released the 3D print files so owners of 3D printers can design and print their own custom shell. The Lumia 820 shells, however, do not have any link to the Windows Phone software. Jolla’s handset will cost €399 ($ 513) and is slated to ship at the end of the year. Jolla notes: Expected availability by end of 2013 subject to demand in your local market. Sales will start in European countries with more countries to follow. If you join the Movement and get the pre-order number to buy the phone when available, you’ll pay no more than 399€; including applicable VAT in Europe, but excluding shipping costs, duties and any local taxes. Specs wise, the device has a 4.5″ Estrade display, a dual-core chip, 4G, 16GB internal memory plus a microSD card slot, an 8MP auto focus camera, a user-replaceable battery. The device is powered by Jolla’s Sailfish OS but can also run Android apps, giving it something of a leg up. Jolla is also encouraging developers to build native Sailfish apps too. The hardware reveal is also the start of Jolla’s pre-order sales campaign, announced last month. Jolla is due to hold an event in Helsinki today — dubbed the Jolla LoveDay — to promote the handset and encourage fans to pre-oder the device, having kept the design tightly under wraps up to now.
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Tag Archives: years
Finnish MeeGo Startup Jolla Reveals First Phone, With Customisable Shells, $513 Price-Tag, Coming At Year’s End
Computer viruses on rise for first time in years, Microsoft warns
Computer viruses are on the rise worldwide for the first time in years, according to Microsoft security expert Tim Rains.
FOX News
iTunes: Still Slowing Down Windows PCs After All These Years
colinneagle sends this quote from an article at NetworkWorld: “I run a very nifty desktop utility called Rainmeter on my PC that I heartily recommend to anyone who wants to keep an eye on their system. One of its main features is it has skins that can monitor your system activity. Thanks to my numerous meters, I see all CPU, disk, memory and network activity in real time. the C: drive meter. It is a circle split down the middle, with the right half lighting up to indicate a read and the left half lighting up for write activity. The C: drive was flashing a fair amount of activity considering I had nothing loaded save Outlook and Word, plus a few background apps. At the time, I didn’t have a Rainmeter skin that lists the top processes by CPU and memory. So instead, I went into the Task Manager, and under Performance selected the Resource Monitor. Under the Processes tab, the culprit showed its face immediately: AppleMobileDeviceService.exe. It was consuming a ridiculous amount of threads and CPU cycles. The only way to turn it off is to go into Windows Services and turn off the service. There’s just one problem. I use an iPhone. I can’t disable it. But doing so for a little while dropped the CPU meters to nothing. So I now have more motivation to migrate to a new phone beyond just having one with a larger screen. This problem has been known for years. AppleMobileDeviceService.exe has been in iTunes since version 7.3. People complained on the Apple boards more than two years ago that it was consuming up to 50% of CPU cycles, and thus far it’s as bad as it always has been. Mind you, Mac users aren’t complaining. Just Windows users.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Friday Poll: Can Google I/O possibly top last year’s?
Google set a high bar with its skydiving introduction of Glass last year. Could this year’s conference contain more “wow-ness?” [Read more]
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Sony records its first net profit in five years
Electronics giant swings profit on sale of assets while demand continues to deteriorate for products in its core electronics business. [Read more]
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Quantum network secretly running for 2 years
Why Your New Car’s Technology Is Four Years Old
Lucas123 writes “While you can buy a 1TB hard drive for your computer for less than $ 100, Ford today offers 10GB. Don’t expect much more anytime soon. Apart from the obvious — a car’s development process can be four years long — the automotive industry also tends to be behind the tech curve because of a lack of equipment standardization. And, while it’s possible for the industry to build modular infotainment systems that could be upgraded over the life of the car, there are no plans to do so. Instead, car companies intend to offer software upgradable vehicles through 4G connectivity and data storage and entertainment streaming through the cloud, which means they have to worry less about onboard hardware reliability and standardization.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Los Alamos National Lab has had quantum-encrypted internet for over two years
Nothing locks down data better than a laser-based quantum-encrypted network, where the mere act of looking at your data causes it to irrevocably change. Although such systems already exist, they’re limited to point-to-point data transfers since a router would kill the message it’s trying to pass along just by reading it. However, Los Alamos National Labs has been testing an in-house quantum network, complete with a hub and spoke system that gets around the problem thanks to a type of quantum router at each node. Messages are converted at those junctures to conventional bits, then reconverted into a new encrypted message, which can be securely sent to the next node, and so on.
The researchers say it’s been running in the lab for the last two and a half years with few issues, though there’s still a security hole — it lacks quantum integrity at the central hub where the data’s reconverted, unlike a pure quantum network. However, the hardware would be relatively simple to integrate into any fiber-connected device, like a TV set-top box, and is still more secure than any current system — and infinitely better than the 8-character WiFi code you’re using now.
Filed under: Science, Internet, Alt
Source: Cornell University Library
Government Lab Reveals Quantum Internet Operated Continuously For Over Two Years
How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years
Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how this was the year you had to quit your job. I gave the reasons why. It wasn’t a gung-ho “you have to be an entrepreneur” article. It was more: bad shit is happening in the corporate world and bit by bit you’re going to feel the urge to quit.
TechCrunch
Call of Duty: Ghosts is this year’s CoD entry, headed to 360, PS3, Wii U, PC and next-gen consoles on November 6
Like Punxsutawney Phil’s shadowgazing, we can rightfully expect a new Call of Duty game to be announced annually and available at the holidays. Also like our groundhog friend, the only annual questions we must ask are in the details — what is this year’s Call of Duty about, and who’s making it? It turns out that this year’s Duty development, unsurprisingly, falls on Infinity Ward’s shoulders — the folks who created the much lauded Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare — and it’s named “Call of Duty: Ghosts.” It’s arriving on a whole mess of platforms this November 6th, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC, but also PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox — given that we don’t know release dates for the PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox, it stands to reason that Ghosts could arrive on a different date for those platforms. It’s also likely we’ll see a handheld version on Nintendo’s 3DS made by someone other than Infinity Ward, but we’ve got no direct word on that just yet.
The “Ghosts” in the title references … well, we’re not entirely sure. Previous CoD games featured a character named “Ghost” fairly prominently, though the plurality indicates a game about more than one individual. We’re holding out hope that the often overserious, dramatic tone of previous CoD games is being completely thrown out in favor of a goofy game about hunting ghosts. The bullets pass right through their ethereal form! Run for your life!
Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo
After Eight Years On Facebook’s Board, Jim Breyer Exits To Focus On His New Harvard Board Seat
Venture capitalist Jim Breyer is giving up his seat on Facebook’s board in June, which he’s held since April 2005. The split is amicable, and stems from his desire to concentrate on his new board seat with the Harvard University Corporation Board. Breyer joined the Facebook board after his venture firm Accel became one of Facebook’s earliest investors, leading its $ 12.7 million Series A.
TechCrunch
Suspected LulzSec hacker arrested in Australia could face 12 years in jail
Ancient Europeans mysteriously vanished 4,500 years ago
U.K.’s First 4G Network Now Has 318k LTE Adopters 5 Months After Launch – “On Track” For 1M By Year’s End
EE, the U.K.’s first and still only 4G network operator, has broken out 4G-specific customer numbers for the first time — confirming that after five months of 4G trading it has hit a total of 318,000 4G-specific customers. The carrier has previously reported total postpaid 3G and 4G additions for its Q4 quarter, when it said it saw 201,000 net gains in the quarter.
TechCrunch
NASA video displays 3 years of Sun images in 3 minutes
NASA‘s Solar Dynamics Observatory, more commonly known as SDO, has spent the last three years taking pictures of the sun, showing off its steady increase in activity as its latest 11-year cycle nears its peak. As part of the project, NASA has taken some of the images and compiled them into a single 3-minute video,
Alt-week 4.20.13: NASA’s Space Shop, nature’s needles and 30 years of cellphone bills
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days.
The natural world offers up some ingenious biology that is only possible through many, many years of evolution. Other ideas, well, they come about through good old-fashioned brain power. We’ve got examples of both in this edition. Naturally. This is alt-week.
GM’s Opel division returns to Shanghai Auto Show after 5 years
After 7 Years & 50K Storefronts Created, Shopify Launches Major Redesign To Simplify Online Store-Building
Forrester recently predicted that the online retail market will grow to $ 370 billion over the next four years, up from $ 231 billion this year — a 10 percent compound annual growth rate. In other words, the message is clear: The eCommerce juggernaut ain’t slowing down any time soon. In 2013, every business needs some kind of online presence; the problem, of course, is that many small business owners don’t have the technical know-how (or capital) to set up their own eCommerce marketplace.
TechCrunch
Microsoft disses Facebook Home as so ‘two years ago’
Microsoft took off the gloves and took a big swing at Facebook today, calling the social network’s new Home launcher an old idea.
Computerworld News
Warming temperatures melt 1600 years worth of ice in 25 years
In what is a profound visual display of the earth’s increasingly warmer temperatures, glacial ice in the Andes that took a minimum of 1600 years to form have melted drastically in a mere 25 years, leaving behind a large pool of water framed by exposed rock and dimished beds of ice. As the ice melts,
Apple’s iPad, 3 years in: Magical? Some beg to differ
Apple’s iPad was released three years ago today. Needless to say, there have been plenty of detractors over the last three years. [Read more]
CNET News
The first mobile phone call was placed 40 years ago today
The cellphone turns 40 years old today
It’s been 40 years since the world’s first mobile phone call
On April 3rd 1973, Martin Cooper made the first mobile call on the nine-inch (and 28-ounce) Motorola DynaTAC. Dialing up a rival at AT&T, he apparently said that he was ringing “to see if my call sounds good at your end.” While briefcase-size models had come before it, it’s Motorola’s truly mobile phone that became the go-to power accessory for the likes of Gordon Gekko, Zack Morris and, er, American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman. Since its heyday, however, the AMPS analog networks that the phone used to run on have now largely disappeared, replaced by digital ones that have added better call clarity, not to mention data connectivity at ever-improving speeds. We’ve come a long way.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Via: Sky News
Nearly Two Years Later, Nebula Launches A Mainframe Style “Cloud Computer” Built On OpenStack
Nebula has launched its long awaited Nebula One, a hyped but often delayed integrated system that Co-Founder and former NASA CTO Christopher Kemp calls a “cloud computer” that takes mainframes and time sharing into the future with the cloud. Nebula launched at OSCON in 2011 with the goal of building systems that Kemp said would last “for generations to come.” It is now nearly two years later and Kemp says Nebula is officially here. Nebula One is built on what Kemp says is the company’s “Cloud Controller,” a hardware appliance that turns server racks into a scalable on-premise system that combines compute, storage and networking into one machine. It runs “Cosmos,” Nebula’s distributed enterprise cloud operating system, which configures servers that plug into the Nebula hardware. The technology is built for self-service and supports APIs for OpenStack and Amazon Web Services. It plugs into IBM, Dell or HP servers. Nebula, under Kemp’s direction, also has a flare for the dramatic: Nebula has some deep challenges ahead for it. The market is deeply competitive. There are orchestration providers such as Ubuntu JuJu. Mirantis helps companies integrate OpenStack. Startups such as Piston Cloud and Cloudscaling have developed their own cloud operating systems. But the mightiest competitors are companies such as IBM, EMC and Oracle that all are marketing this new generation of integrated systems. Kemp says a differentiator is its capability to abstract the complexity of what it takes to launch OpenStack. That will be Nebula’s best advantage. And now that is actually ready to ship then we will see how much traction this new cloud system actually gets.
TechCrunch
After 8 years, YouTube is finally shutting down
No, not really. In celebration of April Fool’s Day, YouTube went all out with their (highly unbelievable) prank. Now some of you may be saying, “You’re one day early YouTube, it’s March 31st”, but you have to keep in mind that its April 1st in some countries already, like Japan. In its April Fool’s Day
NetWare 3.12 Server Taken Down After 16 Years of Continuos Duty
An anonymous reader writes “Ars Technica’s Peter Bright reports on a Netware 3.12 server that has been decommissioned after over 16 years of continuous operation. The plug was pulled when noise from the server’s hard drives become intolerable. From the article: ‘It’s September 23, 1996. It’s a Monday. The Macarena is pumping out of the office radio, mid-way through its 14 week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, doing little to improve the usual Monday gloom…Sixteen and a half years later, INTEL’s hard disks—a pair of full height 5.25 inch 800 MB Quantum SCSI devices—are making some disconcerting noises from their bearings, and you’re tired of the complaints. It’s time to turn off the old warhorse.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Saturn’s rings are 4 billion years old
The dazzling rings of Saturn and its moons are likely more than 4 billion years old — the cosmic remnants of the solar system's birth, scientists say.
FOX News
Romanian citizen sentenced to five years in phishing scheme
A 28-year-old Romanian man was sentenced on Tuesday to five years in prison for his role in a phishing scheme, as part of a seven-year investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Computerworld News
Study Finds Universe Is 100 Million Years Older Than Previously Thought
skade88 writes “Reuters is reporting that scientists now say the universe is 100 million years older than previously thought after they took a closer look at leftover radiation from the Big Bang. This puts the age of the Universe at 13.8 billion years. The new findings are the direct results from analyzing data provided by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft. The spacecraft is providing the most detailed look to date at the remnant microwave radiation that permeates the universe. ‘It’s as if we’ve gone from a standard television to a high-definition television. New and important details have become crystal clear,’ Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics, told reporters on a conference call.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
#HappyBirthday! Twitter and 7 years of transformation
Seven years ago today, Twitter was born when the first tweet was sent out, marking the arrival of a new way to communicate online. As long as you did so in less than 140 characters.
Computerworld News
Google’s Schmidt Says Chrome & Android Will Remain Separate – But Don’t Be Fooled: Two Years Ago He Confirmed They Will Merge
Google’s Eric Schmidt has said Mountain View will keep its two OSes, Android and Chrome, separate after all, according to a Reuters report. Schmidt, who is in India attending an IT event called Big Tent Activate Summit, said the two operating systems will remain separate products but apparently also said there could be more “commonality” between them.
TechCrunch
Could Twitter Have Stopped the Media’s Rush To War In Iraq Ten Years Ago?
Hugh Pickens writes “On the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Eric Boehlert writes that if Twitter had been around during the winter of 2002-2003, it could have provided a forum for critics to badger Beltway media insiders who abdicated their role as journalists and fell in line behind the Bush White House’s march to war. ‘Twitter could have helped puncture the Beltway media bubble by providing news consumers with direct access to confront journalists during the run-up to the war,’ writes Boehlert. ‘And the pass-around nature of Twitter could have rescued forgotten or buried news stories and commentaries that ran against the let’s-go-to-war narrative that engulfed so much of the mainstream press.’ For example, imagine how Twitter could have been used in real time on February 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell made his infamous attack-Iraq presentation to the United Nations. At the time, Beltway pundits positively swooned over Powell’s air-tight case for war. ‘But Twitter could have swarmed journalists with instant analysis about the obvious shortcoming. That kind of accurate, instant analysis of Powell’s presentation was posted on blogs but ignored by a mainstream media enthralled by the White House’s march to war.’ Ten years ago, Twitter could have also performed the task of making sure news stories that raised doubts about the war didn’t fall through the cracks, as invariably happened back then. With swarms of users touting the reports, it would have been much more difficult for reporters and pundits to dismiss important events and findings. ‘Ignoring Twitter, and specifically ignoring what people are saying about your work on Twitter, isn’t really an option the way turning a blind eye to anti-war bloggers may have been ten years ago,’ concludes Boehlert. ‘In other words, Twitter could have been the megaphone — the media equalizer — that war critics lacked ten years ago.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Twenty-Five Years in Prison for Helping Hackers? Seriously?
A maximum sentence of 25 years for enabling hackers to vandalize a news website is totally nuts.
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it indicted Matthew Keys, 26, Reuter’s deputy social media editor, for allegedly enabling some members of hacker organization Anonymous to hack and change content on the LA Times’ website back in 2010. The possible maximum sentence he could face if convicted? Twenty-five years in prison.
Years in the Making, Promising Rechargeable Metal-Air Batteries Head to Market
A Scottsdale, Arizona-based startup is now selling batteries that promise to be a cheaper alternative for grid backup.
After years of development, a novel battery technology from the startup Fluidic Energy is being commercialized (see “Betting on a Metal-Air Battery Breakthrough”). It’s a rechargeable metal-air battery whose first application is replacing diesel and lead-acid battery backup systems for telecommunications towers, and for other businesses that need a steady supply of power. The company has been quietly demonstrating its battery with customers for a year. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Fluidic Energy founder and chief technology officer Cody Friesen made details about its product publicly available for the first time.
Seagate ships two billion hard drives, sold half of them in the last four years
Seagate might have been selling hard drives since 1980, but it’s seen a huge increase in demand in the last few years, allowing it to double its total sales since 2008, crossing the two billion unit milestone in the process. It’s thanking everyone’s unabated desire for streaming video, online shopping and other heavy-lifting data services for the uptick, with the company predicting that hunger for storage is likely to quadruple in the next two years. Thanks a lot, Ultra High Definition.
Filed under: Storage
Tesla will repay loan 5 years earlier than expected
Tesla had made statements before about repaying its loan to the Department of Energy ahead of schedule, and that it plans on forgoing help from the government in the future in order to thrive as a stand-alone company. Tesla has now stated that it has changed its loan’s terms of agreement, and it expects to
Google patents rear-touch controls 6 years after Apple
A patent application has just revealed that Google is going to be implementing rear-touch controls for its future Android smartphones. The patent is similar to a patent filed by Apple in 2006, which it planned on using to implement the rear-touch feature in its future iPads. However, it’s been 7 years since Apple was granted
Global temps highest in 4,000 years, according to report
Global warming: it’s a heated debate, but a recent report suggests that temperatures here on Earth have been the highest they’ve ever been in 4,000 years. Plus, it’s predicted that over the next few decades, temperatures are likely to surpass levels not seen on Earth since before the last ice age occurred. The study was
Smartwatches: The next big thing or this year’s fad?
commentary: A computer on the wrist has so far had a lukewarm reception from bleeding-edge buyers and reviewers. Sounds like just about every other major new product. [Read more]
CNET News
Mobile World Congress: the year’s best smartphone party
The annual event in Barcelona, Spain, will produce some of 2013′s most exciting smartphone news. Join CNET as we cover the show inside and out. [Read more]
CNET News
Identity fraud in US reaches highest level in three years
U.S. consumers experienced the highest level of identity theft in three years in 2012, although much of the fraud losses were absorbed by banks and merchants, according to a new survey.
Computerworld News
Large Hadron Collider stops for two years of tune-ups, goes out on a high note (video)
We’ve long known that the Large Hadron Collider would need to take a break, but that doesn’t take the edge off of the moment itself: as of Valentine’s Day, the particle accelerator has conducted its last test for the next two years. The giant research ring will undergo sweeping repairs and upgrades that should should give it the superconducting connectors needed to hit the originally planned 14TeV of combined collision energy, versus the 8TeV it’s been limited to almost since the beginning. CERN’s machine arguably earned the downtime. After a rough start, it went on to produce rafts of collision data and healthy evidence of the elusive Higgs boson. If you’re still down, think of the hiatus as doing us a favor — it postpones any world-ending disasters until around 2015.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: CERN
Heroku Admits To Performance Degradation Over The Past 3 Years After Criticism From Rap Genius
Heroku, the popular cloud application platform, may not be as fast today as it was three years ago. Yesterday, Rap Genius‘ James Somers , posted a widely read blog post, arguing that Heroku had quietly changed the way it distributes tasks from Ruby on Rails apps across the Amazon EC2 machines it makes available to its users at some point in the last few years without alerting developers of this change. Instead of intelligently routing requests to the next available server, as Heroku did in its early days, Somers argued that it now randomly distributes requests, resulting in increased queuing times. Today, Heroku’s general manager Oren Teich admitted that this is indeed the case.
TechCrunch
US Cellular to spread its LTE wings to 87 percent of customers by year’s end
While it’s only the nation’s eighth largest carrier, US Cellular is said to be well on its way to covering 87 percent of its customer base — that’s more than 3,800 additional cities and towns — with the sweet speed of LTE by the end of 2013. In a statement released today, the carrier said “select cities” in California, Kansas and Nebraska will see US Cellular-flavored LTE for the first time. They include Lincoln and Omaha in Nebraska, Manhattan in Kansas, and Eureka and Ukiah in California. Existing LTE areas in Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin will expand to other cities as well. That’s an increase of about 26 percent since its last LTE outbreak, though US Cellular has not yet revealed the exact timeline of these rollouts just yet. In the meantime, we’d check US Cellular’s 4G coverage map to see if you’re in one of the speed-blessed zones. Just don’t hit that F5 button too often, eh?
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Via: Fierce Wireless
Source: US Cellular
CERN’s LHC Powers Down For Two Years
An anonymous reader writes “Excitement and the media surrounded the Higgs boson particle for weeks when it was discovered in part by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But now, the collider that makes its home with CERN, the famed international organizational that operates the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, is powering down. The Higgs boson particle was first discovered by the LHC in 2012. The particle, essentially, interacts with everything that has mass as the objects interact with the all-powerful Higgs field, a concept which, in theory, occupies the entire universe.” We covered the repair announcement last month.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
After 8 Years On The Web, Project Management Platform Basecamp Finally Launches An “Official” iOS App
Basecamp, the project management platform developed by 37 Signals that launched in 2004, is still alive and kicking, which is something of a feat considering how many companies have come and gone in this space over the years. Plus, more recently, a slew of promising new players have entered the market, including Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein’s Asana, Joel Spolsky’s Trello, Siasto and Podio (now part of Citrix) — to name a few.
TechCrunch
Porsche celebrates 50 years of the 911
Forty years ago, the Ohm F speaker was a game-changer; it still is
The Ohm Acoustics F omnidirectional speaker was such a radical advance in 1972 few 21st century speakers can match its sound. [Read more]
CNET News
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