Tech Today w/ Ken May

Continue reading European Union extends Beatles’ copyright, still gonna have to buy the White Album

European Union extends Beatles’ copyright, still gonna have to buy the White Album originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It took Microsoft long enough, but they’ve finally (FINALLY!) changed the blue screen of death to be something a little more friendly and a little less scary. More

Stopping just short of bundling its announcement with an “Eye of the Tiger” MP3, Netgear’s rolling out the hyperbole carpet for its now available N900. Heralding it as “the most advanced wireless home router,” the sleekly-designed $180 box packs six antennas for an extended WiFi range, and is capable of speeds up to 900Mbps — that’s with both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands delivering data at a full 450Mbps. Sure, TRENDnet’s already called First! with its own 450Mbps concurrent dual-band device, but the real focus here is on the added extras. In addition to the two USB ports — capable of 30% faster transfer rates — Netgear’s thrown in a suite of goodies, like its Genie network monitoring application, Live Parental Controls, printer sharing, video stream optimization, DLNA, gigabit wired ethernet, guest access, WPA and WPA2 security protocols, usage meter and, lastly, a shutoff timer. Clearly, this isn’t your ordinary wireless router, and that’s exactly the company’s point. Click on past the break for the official presser.

Continue reading Netgear’s N900 dual-band router hits 900Mbps top speed, pats itself on the back

Netgear’s N900 dual-band router hits 900Mbps top speed, pats itself on the back originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google debuted its long awaited flight search Tuesday, achieving Concorde-like speed in returning airfares to would-be flyers.

The new search, powered by the data and algorithms it got when it bought ITA Software for $700 million in April, can be found directly at Google.com/flights, or in its usual results when a user types in a query such as “flights from lax to atl.”

Google’s purchase of ITA Software was contested by many vertical travel search companies on the grounds of anti-competitiveness, but the feds ultimately approved the purchase in April, with a few conditions on Google’s licensing of the data to third parties. Microsoft’s Bing launched with its own travel search as a way to differentiate itself from Google, using predictive technology to counsel searchers on whether a fare price was likely to go up or down.

Trying out Google’s take on flight search, one can see why traditional flight search engines feared the deal. Google has clearly integrated ITA’s smart algorithms that make sense of ever-changing airline inventory with its massive search infrastructure.

The site’s defining feature? Speed. Results from flight searches show up almost instantly—which comes as something of a miracle, given how accustomed we’ve all become to ten second-waits to find a cheap fare to Boise, Idaho.

The search has the usual bells and whistles to refine searches and a nifty map.

Currently, booking a flight requires you to click over to an airline’s site, which isn’t always seamless since you may have to repick the exact flight when you hit the airline’s page. The flight search also gives you the option to limit a search to only one airline, but in the case of choosing Virgin America, Google seemed to have no data.

Despite those limitations, one can only assume that there have been better days inside companies such as Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak, and Hipmunk.

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Google brings flight search into the Jet Age

It’s not finished yet, and Microsoft still has plenty of work ahead of it, but one thing is clear: Windows 8 is a genuine, uncompromised tablet operating system.

It was a long time coming. For many years, Microsoft worked in vain to crack the tablet market. Its previous tablet efforts treated the finger or, more commonly, the stylus as a mouse replacement, never recognizing that touch is simply different. The mouse is precise, accurate, but indirect; touch is imprecise and sloppy, but the direct manipulation it affords makes it fast and fluid.

Windows 8 makes touch a first-class citizen. Where Windows 7 penalized mouseless, keyboardless users with a fiddly, mouse-oriented user interface, Windows 8 lets you leave the mouse and keyboard behind.

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Hands-on with Windows 8: A PC operating system for the tablet age

I can’t wait for 2013. That’s the year where Intel’s Haswell architecture arrives, bringing three very important things. One, the ability to run your laptop for 24 hours on one charge. Heaven. Two, 10 days on “connected standby.” More

Microsoft showed us a more in-depth look at Windows 8 today, from the previously mentioned tablet interface to the traditional mouse-and-keyboard desktop. Here’s what it looks like. More

Dear Lifehacker,
I’m trying to ditch cable but the one thing holding me back is sports. If I want to watch live games my options seem pretty limited. Am I out of luck or am I missing something here? Where, or how, can I watch pretty much any sports game online? More

Today, Microsoft has announced quite the milestone for Windows 7: since its launch in October 2009, a full 450 million licenses have been sold. The numbers are somehow more impressive when broken down; just a hair over 650,000 licenses are sold each day.

Sales of Windows 7 have been on the upswing over the past two months to boot; it seems all that back-to-school prep has given Windows 7 a kick in the pants. The folks in Redmond are fond of calling Windows 7 “the fastest selling version of Windows ever,” and it turns out the claim may not just be a load of marketing fluff.

Microsoft tends to keep unit sales figures quiet, save for big announcements and financial statements, but let’s try and put Microsoft’s achievement in a bit of perspective here. They announced in their Q4 2008 revenue report that they sold 180 million Vista licenses since launch. At this point in Vista’s life (just over a year and half after launch), that averages out to about 335,195 licenses per day. Seems respectable without context, but after the same amount of time, Windows 7 nearly doubles that figure with 632,911 licenses/day.

Vista, to be fair, was a bit of a flop, but 7 compares to its grandfather XP rather nicely too: Microsoft announced that they had sold 210 million copies of XP in May 2004, a window of just about two and a half years since launch. Meanwhile, Windows 7 managed to move 240 million licenses by the time it was a year old.

What does this mean? First, there’s a massive install base of Win7 machines out there and, more important, those same machines should be powerful enough to run Windows 8 when it arrives in the next year or so. In addition it means that more users are connecting to Windows live for SkyDrive sharing and other features – 542,000,000 people to be exact. These are wildly large and impressive numbers and it’s clear that Microsoft has a hit on its hands.

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Microsoft Sold 450 Million Copies Of Windows 7

When you need four digits and a comma to specify the amount of horsepower your car puts down, you know you’re talking about something very, very special indeed. Such is the case for the Concept One, the first car from virtual unknown manufacturer Rimac Automobili, styled by designer Adriano Mudri. The firm (which is Croatian, not Italian, by the way) has created this machine and given it four electric motors. They combine for an astounding 1,088 horsepower but, perhaps even more importantly, enable torque vectoring across all four wheels — varying the power at each corner to pull the car around turns.

That performance equates to a 0 – 62MPH time of 2.8 seconds, while the maximum range is rated as 600km (about 375 miles) thanks to a 92kWh lithium ion phosphate (LiFePO4) battery. It is, alas, just a concept for now, but with a little bit of funding the folks at Rimac hope to bring it to market. And we hope they do too.

Rimac Automobili unveils 1,088 horsepower Concept One electric supercar originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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