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AT&T gets ready to test 5G technologies this 2016

AT&T has been working on possible 5G technologies, such as millimeter waves, for years. Now that it’s time to get serious, it’s teaming up with Ericsson and Intel to ramp up its development in the lab in the second quarter of the year. After that, it’s moving its 5G endeavors out of the lab and into the field, starting with outdoor tests over the summer. The carrier says 60 percent of its mobile traffic in 2015 came from video. It’s moving forward with its 5G plans, because emerging technologies like virtual reality, 4K video, robots, Internet of Things and self-driving cars will be even more demanding. As AT&T’s Chief Strategy Officer John Donovan notes, those technologies “will be immersive, pervasive and responsive to customers. 5G will help make them a reality.” 5G internet could be anywhere from 10 to 100 times faster than LTE, with users observing downloads going gigabits (yes, giga bits) per second. Imagine being able to finish downloading a TV show for less than three seconds. That’s nowhere near enough time to get up and microwave some popcorn. AT&T believes its 5G network will even be able to start streaming videos much, much faster — just 1 to 5 milliseconds from the moment you press play — than an LTE connection. If everything goes well, some parts of Austin, Texas will be able to test out Ma Bell’s 5G tech by the end of this year. The company says it’s conducting tests in a way that enables it to deploy the network commercially as soon as 5G standards are set. You’d have to wait a while for that to happen, though. 3GPP, the international consortium in charge of hashing out network standards, is working on it right now. However, phase one (of two) won’t be completed until the first half of 2018. By the way, AT&T isn’t the only US carrier gearing up to test its next-gen mobile network: Verizon will soon begin its 5G wireless service trials, as well. [Image credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr ] Source: AT&T

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AT&T gets ready to test 5G technologies this 2016

Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

(credit: Netflix) Netflix has been moving huge portions of its streaming operation to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for years now, and it says it has finally completed its giant shift to the cloud. “We are happy to report that in early January of 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service,” Netflix said in a blog post that it plans to publish at noon Eastern today. (The blog should go up at this link .) Netflix operates “many tens of thousands of servers and many tens of petabytes of storage” in the Amazon cloud, Netflix VP of cloud and platform engineering Yury Izrailevsky told Ars in an interview. Netflix had earlier planned to complete the shift by the end of last summer . Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

Time Inc buys…MySpace?

MySpace still exists . Crazy, right? The once monolithic social network had faded into irrelevancy until it was relaunched with a little help from Justin Timberlake back in 2013. The fresh coat of paint wasn’t enough to reinvigorate the platform, however, and it’s now being sold as part of its parent company Viant to Time Inc. Yep, that’s the same Time Inc that publishes Time, Fortune , Entertainment Weekly and a whole bunch of other magazines. The company described the acquisition as “game changing, ” most likely in reference to Viant’s broader ad-tech business. MySpace does, supposedly, still have a part to play in that offering, but it’s notable the site was barely mentioned in the footnote of today’s press release . Source: Time Inc. (Press Release)

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Time Inc buys…MySpace?

Holy Shit! Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of Gravitational Waves

R. Hurt, Caltech/JPL. Since Albert Einstein first predicted their existence a century ago, physicists have been on the hunt for gravitational waves , ripples in the fabric of spacetime. That hunt is now over. Gravitational waves exist, and we’ve found them. Read more…

LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: After being in development for the last three months or so, LibreOffice 5.1 comes today to a desktop environment near you with some of the most attractive features you’ve ever seen in an open-source office suite software product, no matter the operating system used. The release highlights of LibreOffice 5.1 include a redesigned user interface for improved ease of use, better interoperability with OOXML files, support for reading and writing files on cloud servers, enhanced support for the ODF 1.2 file format, as well as additional Spreadsheet functions and features. Yesterday, even with the previous version, I was able to successfully use a moderately complex docx template without a hitch — the kind of thing that would have been a pipe-dream not too long ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released

You can run over 1,000 Windows 3.1 programs in your browser

The Internet Archive has spent many years gathering and storing digital content from the past. It now hosts millions of web pages, texts, videos and audio snippets, but recently the site expanded its collection to include software, or more specifically, games . After making more than 2, 400 DOS titles available to play in the browser , the Internet Archive has embraced the GUI and done the same for Windows 3.1. It’s kicked things off by adding more than 1, 000 programs to its Windows 3.1 Software Library. The vast majority of them are games, including Taipei and Ski Free , but there’s plenty of browser-based shareware to get stuck into. There’s also a curated collection called the “Windows Showcase, ” which lists some of the best known programs and games from 20 years ago. It’s been made possible by Boris Gjenero’s EM-DOSbox emulator, which converts Windows runtimes into JavaScript code that can be interpreted by your browser. It’s what underpins the Archive’s DOS collection and testers have already used it to boot Windows 95 . That suggests we may only have to wait a short while to see more Windows programs added to the collection. Via: Internet Archive Blog Source: Windows 3.1 Software Library

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You can run over 1,000 Windows 3.1 programs in your browser

World’s Largest Solar Power Plant To Supply Enough Energy For 1.1 Million People

Lucas123 writes: The world’s largest solar power plant is now live and will eventually provide 1.1 million people in Morocco with power and cut carbon emissions by 760, 000 tons a year. Phase 1 of the Noor concentrated solar power (CSP) plant went live last week, providing 140 megawatts (MW) of power to Morocco. Phases 2 and 3 will be completed by 2018 when the plant is expected to generate more than 500MW of power. The Noor plant, located in south-central Morocco, will cover 6, 178 acres and produce so much energy, that Morocco may eventually start exporting the clean energy to the European market. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IRS website attack nets e-filing credentials for 101,000 taxpayers

The US Internal Revenue Service was the target of a malware attack that netted electronic tax-return credentials for 101,000 social security numbers, the agency disclosed Tuesday. Identity thieves made the haul by using taxpayers’ personal data that was stolen from a source outside the IRS, according to a statement . The attackers then used an automated bot against an application on the IRS website that provides personal identification numbers for the electronic filing of tax returns. In all, the hackers made unauthorized queries against 464,000 social security numbers but succeeded against only 101,000 of them. No personal information was obtained from the IRS systems. Agency officials are flagging the accounts of all affected taxpayers and plan to notify them by mail of the incident. The IRS is also working with other government agencies and industry partners to investigate the hack or stem its effects. The hack occurred last month. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Computer Analysis Reveals the Stunning Complexity of the Star Wars Expanded Universe

The Star Wars expanded universe is huge. Really huge. Like, you just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly huge it really is. To grasp the full extent of this hugeness, a team of data scientists used a new computer program to analyze it, revealing some unexpected things about the extended saga. Read more…

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Computer Analysis Reveals the Stunning Complexity of the Star Wars Expanded Universe

‘Final Fantasy IX’ is now on iOS and Android

You could argue that Final Fantasy IX is the long-running series’ high point. It’s certainly the highest-rated Final Fantasy game on Metacritic , even if its sales and nostalgic value pale in comparison to Final Fantasy VII . Putting that argument aside for a moment, it’s easy to say that it’s definitely a game worth playing if you like JRPGs. And now — less than two months after it was announced — it’s available on iOS and Android. The bar for entry has never been lower. The mobile port includes “high-definition movies and character models, ” autosave, achievements and a collection of “game boosters” that let you essentially cheat your way through the game. You can speed up time, cut out random encounters or hit every enemy for 9, 999 damage. The idea of the boosters is to make the game, which in its original incarnation involved well over a full day’s worth of grinding, more playable for casual gamers. If grinding on a phone or tablet isn’t your thing — or you don’t have a phone with the necessary 8GB of free space to install it — Final Fantasy IX will also be coming to Steam in ” Early 2016 , ” together with the enhancements mentioned above and some Steam trading cards. Via: Kotaku Source: Square Enix (Google Play) , (App Store)

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‘Final Fantasy IX’ is now on iOS and Android

Ken May

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