Remember NetZero? Today the company announced that it’s launching NetZero 4G Mobile Broadband, a wireless service rolling out in 80 US cities and offering value-priced monthly data plans without activation fees, contracts, commitments or overage charges. Customers can chose between two levels of service — Lightspeed (up to 1Mbps down / 384Kbps up) to conserve data and Warpspeed (up to 10Mbps down / 1.5Mbps up) for maximum performance — and can switch back and forth by simply logging into NetZero’s website (this can take up to 15 minutes). Five monthly data plans are available:

• Free, $0, 200MB (limited to Lighspeed and limited to one year)
• Basic, $9.95, 500MB (limited to Lighspeed)
• Plus, $19.95, 1GB
• Pro, $34.95, 2GB
• Platinum, $49.95, 4GB

Two devices are offered — the NetZero 4G Stick ($49.95 + shipping) is a Windows and OS X-compatible USB modem and the NetZero 4G Hotspot ($99.95 + shipping) is an eight device-capable WiFi hotspot with an LCD and a 2200mAh battery.

So far, so good — NetZero is becoming an MVNO. Yet strangely, there’s no mention in any of the PR as to which network the company is using. We test drove NetZero’s new wireless service over the weekend using the WiFi hotspot and figured out that it’s using Clearwire‘s WiMAX network. In fact NetZero’s 4G Stick is identical to the Clear 4G Mobile USB modem (manufactured by Ubee), and its 4G Hotspot is the same as the Clear Spot Apollo (a rather bulky unit made by Gemtek)– see the FCC links below and read on for our impressions after the break.

Continue reading NetZero launches ‘4G’ wireless service, we go hands-on

NetZero launches ‘4G’ wireless service, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 07:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NetZero launches ‘4G’ wireless service, we go hands-on

Hugh Pickens writes “Christopher Shea writes in the WSJ that physicists studying Google’s massive collection of scanned books claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words marking an advance in a new field dubbed ‘Culturomics’: the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Published in Science, their paper gives the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has 348,000) with more than half of the language considered ‘dark matter’ that has evaded standard dictionaries (PDF). The paper tracked word usage through time (each year, for instance, 1% of the world’s English-speaking population switches from ‘sneaked’ to ‘snuck’) and found that English continues to grow at a rate of 8,500 new words a year. However the growth rate is slowing, partly because the language is already so rich, the “marginal utility” of new words is declining. Another discovery is that the death rates for words is rising, largely as a matter of homogenization as regional words disappear and spell-checking programs and vigilant copy editors choke off the chaotic variety of words much more quickly, in effect speeding up the natural selection of words. The authors also identified a universal ‘tipping point’ in the life cycle of new words: Roughly 30 to 50 years after their birth, words either enter the long-term lexicon or tumble off a cliff into disuse and go ’23 skidoo’ as children either accept or reject their parents’ coinages.”

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Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language

Surprise, surprise — Apple just let the cat out of it’s own bag. In right around a half-hour, the company will officially unwrap plans to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program commencing later this year. ‘Course, analysts have been clamoring for such an announcement for quite some time, and with a stock price near $600 and some $100 billion in the bank, the outfit can clearly afford it. More specifically, Apple plans to “initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012.” Granted, that’s all subject to the Board of Directors giving the ole a-okay, but we highly doubt the company would issue such knowledge without a practical guarantee that everyone is on board. Additionally, the Company’s Board of Directors has authorized a $10 billion share repurchase program commencing in the Apple’s fiscal 2013, which begins on September 30, 2012; we’re told that said program will be executed over three years, with the main goal being to “neutralize the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs.”

As for CEO Tim Cook’s thoughts on the matter?

“We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You’ll see more of all of these in the future. Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program.”

Naturally, this all shows that Apple is supremely confident in its future, but it doesn’t shed any light into potential acquisitions from a technology standpoint. Strangely enough, it was just a few days ago that Mr. Cook ended his new iPad keynote with a promise that 2012 would be chock full of unbelievable things from his company, but it sounds like the only folks celebrating this particular announcement are those with a hand in the stockpile. We don’t expect to glean much more than what’s given in the presser just past the break, but we’ll be liveblogging the actual conference call starting at 9AM ET.

Continue reading Apple announces dividend and share repurchase program for 2012, expects to spend $45 billion over three years

Apple announces dividend and share repurchase program for 2012, expects to spend $45 billion over three years originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple announces dividend and share repurchase program for 2012, expects to spend $45 billion over three years

judgecorp writes “Google is cooling its data center in Douglas County, Georgia, using ‘recycled’ water that has been through the bathtubs and toilets of the surrounding community. So called ‘grey’ water is perfectly adequate for the data center’s cooling system which relies on evaporation (the wet T-shirt effect), says Google.”

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Google Cools Data Center With Bathroom Water

The latest refresh of the Linux kernel, 3.3, is now available, and the second release of 2012 brings with it the long-awaited merging of code from Google’s little side project. While that is particularly interesting to developers looking to boot Android or run apps on the stock Linux kernel (FYI: optimized power management and other infrastructure that didn’t make it this time will arrive in the next release, 3.4) and represents a resolution to the issues that kept the two apart for so long it’s not the only new feature included. There are improvements to file systems like Btrfs, memory management, networking, security and much, much more. Hit the source link below for the full changelog or grab the code and from the usual locations and get your compile on directly.

Linux kernel 3.3 released with merged Android code and more originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 04:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Linux kernel 3.3 released with merged Android code and more

diegocg writes “Linux 3.3 has been released. The changes include the merge of kernel code from the Android project. There is also support for a new architecture (TI C6X), much improved balancing and the ability to restripe between different RAID profiles in Btrfs, and several network improvements: a virtual switch implementation (Open vSwitch) designed for virtualization scenarios, a faster and more scalable alternative to the ‘bonding’ driver, a configurable limit to the transmission queue of the network devices to fight bufferbloat, a network priority control group and per-cgroup TCP buffer limits. There are also many small features and new drivers and fixes. Here’s the full changelog”

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Linux 3.3 Released

Apple is planning a conference call first thing Monday morning to “announce the outcome of the Company’s discussions concerning its cash balance.” The company made this announcement in a statement on Sunday and the news will take place at 9am Eastern Time on Monday, March 19.

The surprise call comes as Apple’s board has been barraged with questions—more than usual, that is—about the company’s plans for its massive pile of cash. Apple is coming dangerously close to the $100 billion mark ($97.6 billion, to be exact) in the bank. With no outstanding debts to be seen, investors have been stepping up their questions to CEO Tim Cook and COO Peter Oppenheimer about whether Apple plans to finally start paying dividends to stockholders, invest the money in something new, or pursue any other plans possibly in the works.

It’s unlike Apple to announce a call for the sole purpose of discussing its cash situation, so there might be some news on its way come Monday morning. What do you think it will be? Vote in our poll and find out what the answer is tomorrow morning when we cover Apple’s announcement.

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Apple to announce plans for $100 billion cash pile on Monday

tekgoblin writes “This is an interesting move by Google but not completely off the rocker for them. Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results. Google plans to penalize overly optimized sites because they want to level the playing field for other websites who do not concentrate on such efforts. From the article: ‘Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains the following: “We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.” The search engine at Google is about to go through a major overhaul and de-prioritizing sites with heavy SEO is just a small part in the big picture to bring better search results. The changes to the search engine will be coming in the next few months.'”

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Google Is Planning To Penalize Overly Optimized Sites

Cramming a QXGA display with a resolution of 2048×1526 into a device as small as the iPad might seem like an impressive accomplishment. But Forth Dimension Displays have managed to squeeze that same number of pixels into a display that’s smaller than an inch. More »

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This Tiny Display Measures Less Than an Inch But Still Packs As Much Resolution As the New iPad [Displays]

New submitter EuNao writes “TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), the organization based on ‘ideas worth sharing,’ launched a new initiative this past week. It is called TED-Ed, and it aims to engage students with unforgettable lessons. There are many places in the world where a wonderful teacher or mentor is teaching something mind-blowing, but as it stands now not many people have access to that powerful experience. Ted-Ed aims to bring that engaging experience to everyone who has an internet connection. Here are summaries and links to the nine videos that were initially released.”

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TED Education — Video Lessons For Students