Apple’s third-generation iPad, colloquially referred to as the iPad 3, is already setting Apple sales records after its first weekend on the market. Apple announced on Monday afternoon that it has already sold 3 million devices since the iPad’s launch on March 16.

The iPad 3 includes a number of upgrades over the iPad 2, including a sharp “retina” display, an autofocus 5MP iSight camera, and 4G LTE networking options. The iPad 3 also has beefed up graphics capabilities and battery capacity, largely to power its 4x resolution increase.

Those features clearly caught the attention of both previous iPad users as well as new iPad users; one survey we saw suggested that half of those waiting in line to buy one last Friday were first-time iPad users. For comparison, the original iPad sold about 3 million units in its first full quarter of availability. And though the iPhone still outsells the iPad by a significant margin, the iPhone 4S sold 4 million units during its launch weekend.

AT&T also claimed that the new iPad set a new single day device activation record for the company. This record was most recently set by the iPhone 4S last October.

The launch of the iPad 3 is Apple’s most aggressive so far. Already available in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Switzerland, UK, and the US Virgin Islands, it will be available in 24 more countries starting this Friday, March 23. Those countries include Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.

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Apple moves 3 million third-generation iPads over launch weekend

We knew good and well that Microsoft was aiming for a 2012 launch of its latest and greatest operating system, and if sources reporting to Bloomberg are accurate, it looks like we’ll have a date with Mrs. October. Purportedly, work will wrap on Win8 this summer, with PCs and tablets (!) to ship in October carrying the newfangled OS. We’re told that the initial rollout will include devices running Intel and ARM processors, and not surprisingly, this positions Microsoft to make a serious play for holiday dollars. Still wondering if it’s for you? Give the Consumer Preview a run, won’tcha?

Microsoft aiming for October 2012 release of Windows 8, tablets and PCs on deck originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft aiming for October 2012 release of Windows 8, tablets and PCs on deck

Golan sez, “The Free Universal Construction Kit is a collection of adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet, or unmeetable, by corporate interests.”

F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab are pleased to present the Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests.

The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob. Our adapters can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com and other sharing sites as a set of 3D models in .STL format, suitable for reproduction by personal manufacturing devices like the Makerbot (an inexpensive, open-source 3D printer).

OK, that’s pretty badass right there.

The Free Universal Construction Kit

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3D-printed adapter bricks allow interconnection between ten kids’ construction toys

When Apple dropped the second developer preview of Mountain Lion on Friday it didn’t see fit to include release notes, instead leaving it to us and the rest of the blogosphere to dig up the new features ourselves. The big ones are clearly Twitter alerts in the Notification Center and the introduction of tab syncing in Safari through iCloud. The latter of which should sooth iPhone fans that were jealous of Chrome for Android. Smaller enhancements were also turned on, including warnings when a program asks to access your contacts and location-based alarms in the Reminders app — which can be shared with your iOS-based mobile device as well. We’ll keep looking for more, but let us know you discover any new features in the comments.

Mountain Lion Developer Preview 2’s new features detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mountain Lion Developer Preview 2’s new features detailed

wiredmikey writes “Earlier this month, researchers from Kaspersky Lab reached out to the security and programming community in an effort to help solve a mystery related to ‘Duqu,’ the Trojan often referred to as ‘Son of Stuxnet’, which surfaced in October 2010. The mystery rested in a section of code written an unknown programming language and used in the Duqu Framework, a portion of the Payload DLL used by the Trojan to interact with Command & Control (C&C) servers after the malware infected system. Less than two weeks later, Kaspersky Lab experts now say with a high degree of certainty that the Duqu framework was written using a custom object-oriented extension to C, generally called ‘OO C’ and compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008 (MSVC 2008) with special options for optimizing code size and inline expansion.”

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Rick Prelinger sez,

I’m delighted to let everyone know about our newest Internet Archive collection which, for want of a cooler title, we’re calling 35mm Stock Footage. Digitized from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used. Studio librarians saved them for use in future productions, and now you can download and use them yourself in a variety of formats, including 720p HD, absolutely free. As far as I know, this is Internet Archive’s first all-HD collection.

In the first wave of materials: a trip across the George Washington Bridge in the late 1940s, a snake slithering on rainy ground, aerials of Hollywood studios, 1940s Southern California hotrodders, stunt flying, miniature airplanes crashing, the Staten Island Ferry in the 1930s, and much more. Much of the footage is “process plates” — film shot for the rear-projection screens you see out of car, taxi and train windows in old movies.

We’ve also digitized HD versions of newsreels and short subjects from the 1920s and 1930s, and there are even French “primitive-era” silent films dating back as far as 1905. Please get lost in this collection, make your own movies with it (please upload them to Internet Archive if you can!), and keep watching for more.

Welcome to 35mm Stock Footage

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Trove of free, public domain HD video

Thinkcloud writes “The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.5.1. Some of the core fixes include: don’t crash for empty input data in charts, UI fix on PDF export dialog, don’t copy page styles into temporary clipboard doc, and use the correct db range for the copy. ‘Another milestone for the LibreOffice project was hit this past month as well. “The number of TDF hackers has overtaken the threshold of 400 code developers, with a large majority of independent volunteers and several companies paying full time hackers.” Although some are paid developers, no company employs more than 7% of developers, keeping the project independent and self-governing.'”

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LibreOffice 3.5.1 Released With Fixes

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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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