Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, .NET 4 Beta 1 for general release Wednesday
A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that today, May 18, will be the release date for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1, for MSDN subscribers. The general public will get their first shot at both new technologies on Wednesday.
Though last September's preview edition showed the addition of new tools for application architecture modeling -- moving deep into IBM territory there -- as well as for development team management, it was all being shown under the auspices of the old VS 2008 front end. Soon after the preview edition was released, the company revealed that it was scrapping that more traditional front end in favor of a design based on the Windows Presentation Foundation platform.
Acer increases netbook size with new Aspire One
Acer unveiled its second-generation netbook products today, which include the 11.6" Aspire One 751h, a unit that goes for the bigger overall footprint but with a marginally slimmer profile.
Besides its 11.6" LCD screen (1364 x 768, 16:9), the Acer Aspire One 751h is equipped with a 1.22 GHz Intel Atom Z520, 1 GB SDRAM, and a 160 GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive. Not a lot has changed since the last generation, It comes installed with Windows XP Home SP3, has a multi-card reader, and supports 802.11b/g wireless. The suggested baseline retail price is even the same as the last generation: $349.99, or $379.99 with a six-cell battery.
AT&T re-enters the data services field by way of the cloud
It was literally during the 1960s when engineers first envisioned a realistic concept for remote storage of electronic data. It would be stored and retrieved using a radically redefined telephone network, one which folks might have to wait until 1980 or so to finally witness. And since it required the telephone, the master of the new concept seemed inevitably to be the Bell System -- AT&T.
The reason it didn't happen that way (the breakup of AT&T aside) was because local storage ended up being relatively cheap, and hard drives made sense. But four decades later, in a vastly different global economy, businesses' appetite for storage space is exceeding the ability of even cheap technologies like hard drives to keep providing it. So businesses are once again investigating a telecommunications-based option, and it is amid that backdrop of historical irony that AT&T is re-entering the picture. This morning, the company announced a programmed, systematic entry into the cloud-based data storage market, choosing a few customers at a time for a new on-demand storage service model it's calling Synaptic Storage as a Service.
The technologists' (read: 'geeks') guide to the weekend
There are many bold and beautiful aspects to geekdom, but weekends aren't one of them. Many of us -- most of us -- lay aside our workplace tech tasks and go home to our friends and families and their computer travails. Or we head for movies that send us into paroxysms of fact-checking angst ("As if they'd have given the explosive charges to only Olson and not Kirk or Sulu as well -- worst logistics ever!"). Or we dig into an open-source project or a volunteer effort that looks just like our work taskload. Or we don't take the weekend at all.
And geeks, that's okay. Know who you are and what makes you happy. The secret to geek happiness isn't getting away from it all; it's being able to survey it all from your chosen perch. Which happens to be made of ones and zeros and silicon and DIY and logic and fierce intelligence.
Panasonic's losses quadruple Sony's: down $4.68 billion
This week, major Japanese consumer electronics companies posted their fiscal 2009 revenues, and provided an outlook into the coming year. To say earnings have been disheartening would be a multi-million dollar understatement.
Because of a harsh currency exchange and declining sales, Sony registered a loss of around one billion dollars, NEC's net loss was upwards of $3 billion, Hitachi lost a staggering $8.03 billion, and Sanyo -- which is in the process of merging with Panasonic -- reported a net loss of $970 million.
Verizon Wireless LTE deployment will be ready in 2H 2010, says CEO
Verizon has been an active supporter of LTE since 2007, and anticipated a rollout of the 4G wireless standard in the first half of 2010. Up to this week, judging from what company officials had been saying publicly, the first LTE deployment has been moving along swiftly. CTO Dick Lynch said he expected it would be ready as early as the final months of 2009.
But in an LTE developer's conference on Wednesday, Verizon brought those lofty goals back down to Earth a bit. Instead of the first half of 2010 for commercial deployment, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said the first 20 or 30 LTE markets won't be ready until the second half of the year, and complete US coverage won't be attained for another five years. He did not, however address Lynch's prognosis for an early first rollout. (Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone.)
HP notebook batteries recalled in response to burn hazard
If you're the owner of an HP Pavilion or Compaq Presario made in the last five years, the odds are in favor of you being involved in a battery recall of some sort. In 2005, some 80,000 Pavilion and Presario batteries were recalled, in 2006 another 4,100 were added. Most recently, the massive recall of more than 10 million Sony batteries affected around 32,000 HP notebooks last October.
This week another 70,000 have been tapped for recall.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #5: Multitouch
For close to two decades now, the design of applications has changed surprisingly very little. At their core, apps wait for users to generate input, and they respond -- a server/client model of processing on a very local scale. So in a very real way, what applications do has been a function of how they respond -- the whole graphical environment thingie you've read about has really been a sophisticated way to break down signals the user gives into tokens the application can readily process.
The big roadblock that has suspended the evolution of applications from where they are now, to systems that can respond to such things as voice and language -- sophisticated processes that analyze input before responding to it -- is the token-oriented nature of their current fundamental design. At the core of most typical Windows applications, you'll find a kind of switchboard that's constantly looking for the kinds of simple input signals that it already recognizes -- clicking on this button, pulling down this menu command, clicking on the Exit box -- and forwarding the token for that signal to the appropriate routine or method. Grafting natural-language input onto these typical Windows apps would require a very sophisticated parser whose products would be nothing more than substitutes for the mouse, and probably not very sufficient substitutes at that.
Toshiba sues to block Imation/Memorex DVDs
Japanese consumer electronics company and fundamental DVD patent holder Toshiba filed a patent infringement suit yesterday against Imation Corp and related vendors for "reckless disregard of Toshiba's patent rights" in the creation of recordable DVDs.
Toshiba licenses its essential DVD patents both individually and jointly as a part of the DVD6C Licensing Group, which also includes Hitachi, Panasonic, JVC, Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, and Warner Bros.
Student-developed Flixster app comes to Android
Flixster, the social network for movie buffs, has taken strongly to the gadget, widget, and mobile app distribution channel. Following up on the success of its Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, and Orkut gadgets, it released a popular iPhone app at the end of summer 2008. Now the service has moved onto the Android platform and released a similar app.
Flixster's "Movies" app for iPhone was actually not developed by the company itself, but rather by a Carnegie Mellon sophomore Jeffrey Grossman, who released it to the iTunes App store on his own. Flixster hired Grossman as a consultant, bought his app, and re-branded it.
April showers bring May comScore numbers
Here's food for thought: Twitter isn't just more popular than professional wrestling, though that's something of a shock. It's more popular than baseball. Seems un-American, doesn't it.
It's more popular than MLB.com, anyway; the April comScore numbers are out, and the microblogging service is the 56th most popular site around (as far as unique visitors go), compared to MLB.com's 87th-place ranking. But all three sites are, along with the 236th-ranked stompin' matches World Wrestling Entertainment site, among the top-gaining properties as measured by the Reston, Va.-based ratings service.
Samsung Jacks up AT&T
AT&T and Samsung on Thursday announcement the imminent availability of the Jack, a successor to the exceedingly popular BlackJack and BlackJack II. The handset, also to be known as the i637, goes on sale May 19 and will retail for $100 with a rebate, two-year service agreement, and the other usual restrictions.
The earlier BlackJack models have been, according to Samsung, the best-selling series of Windows Mobile phones ever. The significant upgrade in the new Jack's candy bar-style handset appears to be the 3.2-megapixel video-capable camera, an improvement from the 2 Mpx model in the BlackJack II. The phone will ship with 256 MB of RAM (up from 155 MB with the BlackJack II), 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and GPS. Like its predecessor it has a microSD slot, and can support cards up to 16 GB (up from 4GB). It'll also ship with Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile and Windows Mobile 6.1, though Samsung says that the handset will be 6.5-ready whenever that operating system is released.
Sony loses a billion, but it's not alone
Sony has marked 2008 as a billion dollar loser.
But this is slightly good news. In January, the Japanese consumer electronics giant braced the public for 2008 earnings that it expected to be more than two and a half times worse. The bad part is that despite Sony's best efforts, which include a workforce reduction of 16,000 and closure of 8 manufacturing facilities, the strong Yen is responsible for 85% of the company's losses. The company's sales and operating revenue were only down 2% otherwise.
As Palm moves toward launch, Pre fans speculate frantically
Geeks have a reputation for happily queueing up to buy new things that show their tribal allegiances -- game consoles, Star Trek tickets, and much of Apple's product line. (I'm sure somewhere in this wide world there was a guy sitting on line three days for the Mac mini.) But with no new consoles on the horizon, Apple suspiciously quiet about their WWDC plans, and your reporter refusing to acknowledge the existence of the new Terminator movie, Pre's the fun to be had at the moment. A cluster of rumors, announcements, and tea-leaf prognostications -- along with one Sprint announcement -- are making the rounds as the end of the quarter draws nearer.
Much of the speculation currently revolves around the single solid fact currently known: Sprint's running a win-a-Pre contest. Signups for that sweepstakes conclude Monday night at 11:59 pm CDT, and the drawing will be held one week later, on May 26.
Verizon subsidized netbooks to come from HP
In March, Verizon representatives unofficially said that it could begin selling netbooks with nationwide broadband service as early as the second quarter 2009. Now, the company has said it will begin selling them on May 17.
For a moment, it looked like Verizon would follow AT&T's plan, and offer the Acer Aspire One netbook. At one point, Acer's brand name even showed up on the Verizon Wireless product page, though it was a dead link, and could potentially have correlated to another Acer product, such as its rebranded E-Ten smartphones.
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