NewsforDev | News for Development News - Feature Newsletter: WiFi

Submit Source

New User

Dossiers

ACP-EU

CTA

ICT

ICT4D

S&T

S&T4D

Trade

World News

My News

Subscribe to Feature Newsletter: WiFi

User Login | Lost your Password?

New User
Email:
Username:
Country:
Security Code:
Type Security Code:

WiFi


From the newsfordev database of articles

American Airlines offers in-flight Wi-Fi. Hot damn
Salon.com | Machinist | Web Log 21 08 2008

As Farhad Manjoo predicted months ago, it seems that, indeed, soon -- this time, really soon -- most airlines will have in-flight Internet access. Today American Airlines announced that it would be providing on-board Wi-Fi at $13 per flight on most flights from San Francisco/Los Angeles to New York and New York to Miami. (Technically speaking, we're only talking about AA's Boeing 767-200 fleet.) And like Farhad, I've got pretty much one thing to say to this: Woo-hoo! (Start your angry e-mails ranting about the electronic leash and that annoying guy next to you on the plane now, please.) Not surprisingly, VoIP-based calls (that means no Skype) will theoretically be blocked, so you won't have to worry too much about your overly chatty neighbor trying to call his buddy in Denver to tell him that she's currently flying over his house. That being said, the Dallas Morning News' Airline Biz Blog reports that it was able to get a sustained Skype connection. Maybe the American Airlines techs haven't quite gotten around to port blocking just yet. Aircell, the company behind this new service (it's called Gogo Inflight), will be charging $13 for flights of three hours or more, and $10 for anything under that. The company uses some interesting gadgetry, actually, to make the Internet work at 35,000 feet. As I reported for NPR late last year, Aircell claims that it can shoot an Internet signal by pointing cellphone towers skyward. Given that the only thing between that tower and planes equipped with the special receivers are nice fluffy clouds, the signal travels nicely. The on-board receiver then transfers that signal to a few Wi-Fi routers scattered around the plane so that your iPhone (WiFi-enabled), BlackBerry or laptop can use it. Jack Blumenstein, the company's CEO, told me last year that his company only needs 90 towers to cover the continental U.S. The Washington Post adds, however, that "the company will add 400 more towers to accommodate growing demand for the service." In the past, in-flight Internet used expensive satellite connections. Conexion by Boeing was expensive to install, cost about $10 per hour for the user, and worst of all, it took a fair amount of time to get the gear hooked up. Blumenstein also told me in an interview last year that Aircell's kit only takes an overnight stop at a major airport hub. (Boeing killed off its service in 2006.) Other companies are eager to get on the Wi-Fi wagon as well. Delta announced earlier this month that it would also be partnering with Aircell later this year. Continental apparently will be releasing a free online service, limited to e-mail and instant messaging, that sounds a lot like JetBlue's single plane trial from last December. Southwest and Alaska are banking on satellite-based services provided by another company, Row 44, but neither airline has announced a start date for such service. However, Flight International, an industry publication, reports that Southwest will be trialing Row 44's services before the end of the year. That said, Portfolio.com's Joe Brancatelli remains bearish on the entire prospect of in-flight Net access from a business perspective. He notes that overseas, another European competitor, OnAir (sponsored by Airbus), "seems stalled."

Sugarize it: Intel Classmate 2
One Laptop per Child News 21 08 2008 L. Aaron Kaplan is the founder and an active member of OLPC Austria, where he has, among other projects, ported Sugar to the original Classmate PC. Finally, finally, finally!! I and a few folks have been living with a secret. And of course I wanted to share this as soon as possible. But some events at work (the famous DNS Bug) kept me massively busy. And since work is - well work - you earn a living from it - it got priority. However this nonetheless does not make the secret any less important nor interesting.

Sweet Sugar!

So, what is it about? What's it about? Hm, let's think... the title says "sugarize it". Sugarize what? As you probably know, sugarlabs.org became independant from OLPC with Walter Bender starting a new organization to continue the dream of an open source user interface for OLPC and for other laptops. I have been already "ported" Sugar to the Intel Classmate 1. Back then I was quite disappointed with Intel. I did not do any precise tests but it just felt s.l.o.w.
Also Wayan was ranting against the Classmate 1 (as any good Intel employee would;). I agree - the version 1 was not particularly competitive against the XO in my opinion. But is the Classmate 2? (tada, enter the culprit...)

Silverthrone CPU next to a Penny

So, well... now I received a Classmate 2 with Atom chipset (no, you can't get them yet as far as I know, but you will soon be able to get one for sure). Actually - the fact the you will indeed be able to get them will already be a remarkable difference compared to OLPC's "you can look but not buy" marketing. Not only did I get a Classmate 2 from Intel, they were even happy to supply one! This was almost a shock for me - compared to the constant pushing I had to do at OLPC's doors to be allowed to contribute and to be granted some resources. Way to go Intel! So - again - what can we do with that brand new sample version of the Classmate 2 (Atom based)? Can it compete with the XO? Is the CPU really finally fast and power aware at 2.5 Watts? Uhum... Sugarizing the Classmate 2

Sugarizing gallery

Since the Classmate came already with Ubuntu 7.10 installed, we had to update it to 8.04 over the wifi network. Wait! Did I just write "over the wifi network"? Yes, actually that worked out of the box. So, some 45 minutes later all packages had downloaded and were installed. The next step was to install Sugar. One way would be to use a Live CD which in in general is well maintained. We instead chose to install Sugar directly as Debian packages. We simply followed the wiki pages and found that the packages were not 100% up to date. We could have re-build everything from scratch using jhbuild but according to Daniel this would have taken a long time to build. So, we decided to live with the fact that in the version we tried the browse activity did not work correctly. For sure a more recent version will fix this. Summary: installing Sugar on the Classmate is rather easy. Just follow the instructions. So! How does it look like? Does everything work?

Classmate 2 sugarized!

Camera: Works. Has a pretty decent resolution. Enough for kids to take pictures of things and share it over the network.
Sleep mode: Works. Some minor issues on resume.
Keyboard: Usable. Still a bit small but you get used to it.
Trackpad: Usable. Could be improved with better driver support so that scrolling works better.
Screen resolution: 1024x600 - usable. I miss the reflective display. There are still some minor bugs with placement of objects in Sugar. Supposedly fixed in newer releases.
Wifi: Yup! works out of the box. Currently some issues with resuming after sleep mode. Can be fixed.
OpenGL: Yup, you bet! Glxgears runs in 580 frames / sec. Totally smooth. Great! All OpenGL linux games run great. Tuxracer, GCompris, all there..
Sound: Works ok
Microphone: Fine!
Skype: Works. Nice to have a faster CPU than the XO
Flash: Of course it works if you have space for a full blown Redhat or Ubuntu as basis below it. Didn't bother to install gnash. This means....
YouTube: Works! This is one killer feature for deployment in classrooms. Believe it or not, but Andreas Trawoeger has been brave to test out the features of the XO (and other computers) in a school in Vienna for half a year now. And this was one of the feature he bitterly missed on the XO. Kids love watching things on YouTube and uploading stuff to the site.
Google Earth: Well, Google Earth was a bit CPU and memory hungry. That one started to get a bit slow.
Overall Speed: Needless to say, 1.6GHz is actually really usable for most things in a classroom.
Green ears: No :(
Battery life: Well, medium. I got 3-4 hours out of it. I guess more is doable with proper ACPI support. I guess you can do more with proper tuning.
Price:>188 USD. Approximately 315 Euros in the EU. That is definitely higher. Does it pay off? Yes. Collaboration? Mesh? Yes, you bet! Collaboration between an XO, the Classmate 2 and an HP 2133 worked out of the box. To be fair, we had a wireless access point in between the three devices since OLPC's 802.11s and Intel's 802.11s won't work together out of the box right now. Sigh, I guess that is why we have standards. Hmmm... did you get the head fake? I will leave you to ponder about it. Subjective summary:

Collaboration works out of the box.

Well, the good and cosy feeling of "helping the world" is not present anymore. The green ears are missing, the sweetness factor is gone. ... But.. Hey! On the other hand: this small device is for the first time totally usable! It is fast, compared to the others. There is a dramatic speed improvement compared to the Classmate 1. Would I buy the Classmate 1 for kids? No. Would I buy the Classmate 2? Yes. A friend of mine forgot his laptop at home and he was at my place over the weekend. We had an intensive planning session, lots of research on the web. And since he forgot his laptop at home, he used the Classmate 2. His conclusion? "Totally usable. A bit small for adults." But fast enough. So everything works more or less out of the box! If you have small fingers it might even be usable for adults. Your kids will not look at it and sigh love it and then leave it in a corner. But they will love it because they can actually do things with it. Like adults. I believe what counts is to give kids the possibility to access information that they would not otherwise get access to. With usable tech. Whatever brand. It's an education project, not a laptop project. Right? Well done Intel! Congratulations. Credits where credits are due. The Classmate 2 is a solid product! The wikipedia entry of the Classmate will have to be rewritten for the Classmate 2. Tests by: Daniel Jahre, Helga Schmidt, Andreas Trawoeger, Tano Bojankin, L. Aaron Kaplan @ OLPC (Austria)
Text by: L. Aaron KaplanAaron Kaplan Atom Classmate 2 Intel OLPC Austria Open Source Software Sugar Sugar Labs Sugarized

Google sets up "Big Tent" for bloggers at Democratic and Republican conventions
Salon.com | Machinist | Web Log 20 08 2008

The Big Tent

Various media are reporting today that Google will be funding and operating an 8,000 square foot "headquarters" -- called the "Big Tent" -- a few blocks away from the Democratic convention in Denver. (A similar facility will be set up in St. Paul, Minn., for the Republican convention.) For $100, 500 bloggers, citizen journalists, "new media" journalists and assorted members of the stodgy MSM will have access to a candy buffet, free massages, smoothies, meals, couches for napping, a "YouTube kiosk," and, of course, all the free WiFi they can eat. (If you're interested, sorry, registration is already closed.) But seriously, what does Google get out of this? By providing an environment that's a cross between my home office and a college dorm lounge, does it really hope that bloggers are suddenly going to wake up to the awesome power of Google? Is there any blogger out there who doesn't know about Google? I mean, OK, sure, Google wants to show off Power Reader in Politics, essentially a way to share reading lists of RSS feeds. In other words, now I can read what Obama, McCain or even Arianna Huffington want me to read with a couple of mouse clicks. This essentially is just Google Reader, which debuted three years ago. These bloggers are either already using it, or are using some other similar application/service to follow what all the other blogs are saying. I don't get it. And a YouTube kiosk? Seriously? Yes, YouTube didn't exist during the 2004 convention, but I really don't need to see random bloggers taking jarring clips of themselves while trying to pull their best Campbell Brown impression. Seriously. You know where Campbell Brown will be? On the convention floor, not uploading to YouTube. Plus, if you've spent any time at all on the Internet in the last three years, you already know about YouTube. Especially if you're a blogger. I guess it's just marketing, pure and simple. After all, Coca-Cola is a perpetual sponsor of just about everything, including the Olympics. There are even some folks in Beijing who've never had a Coke before, believe it or not. But here's the key difference; Coke is looking for new markets in China, reports the Wall Street Journal:

Coke has plugged its flagship cola at other Olympiads for decades. But this blitz is especially important for the brand as the Games present a chance for it to vault ahead of arch rival Pepsi-Cola in the race for China's 1.3 billion coveted consumers -- a market that Coke says could be its biggest in the future. Coke is the global leader in the cola wars, with roughly half the market, more than double PepsiCo Inc.'s soft-drink share. In China, Pepsi-Cola is No. 1 -- but early results show Coke's Olympics push, which began in early 2007, is eating into Pepsi's lead. Last year, the Coca-Cola brand claimed 22% of the country's carbonated soft drink market, up half a percentage point from 2006. That still left Coke trailing Pepsi's 22.9% share, which dipped from 23.3%, according to research firm Euromonitor International.

But there isn't exactly an equally untapped market of bloggers (political or otherwise) who've never heard of Google.

More...

Latest News | Login: Users

© 2008 CTA | Disclaimer

Website by Maarten van den Berg | RISQ Consultancy

Powered by MyHeadlines © 2004-2006 Mike Agar.
Page generation: 0.36 Seconds