triumphal latecomer

Saturday, July 27, 2013

New Travel Industry Tactics: Complete Savings | Complete Savings

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Complete Savings: looking at the trends in travel and leisure. the resurgence of the staycation? With schools breaking up for summer this week, are you planning to take a family holiday soon? Did you book a holiday abroad ...

Source: http://completesavingsuk.net/2013/07/26/new-travel-industry-tactics-complete-savings/

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Thursday, July 25, 2013

In switch, US military offers to share spectrum with wireless industry?

airwaves

Alina Selyukh Reuters

18 hours ago

The Defense Department uses the airwaves for programs such as pilot training and drone systems and has faced criticism from some in the industry and in Congress for resisting efforts to open those airwaves for commercial use to satisfy growing demands posed by data-hungry gadgets and services.

Reuters file

More wireless spectrum is needed by carriers to satisfy the growing demands posed by data-hungry gadgets and services.

The U.S. Defense Department is proposing to share some of its radio airwaves with the private sector, a nod to growing pressure from the wireless industry and the Obama administration that federal agencies ease their control of valuable spectrum.

In a letter released by the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, the Department of Defense offers to share the airwaves it now dominates in the slice of frequencies from 1755 megahertz (MHz) to 1780 MHz with spectrum-hungry wireless and Internet companies.

The military would rearrange its systems within that slice of spectrum as well as the 2025-2110 MHz band and compress programs into the 1780-1850 MHz band that it would retain.

The Defense Department uses the airwaves for programs such as pilot training and drone systems and has faced criticism from some in the industry and in Congress for resisting efforts to open those airwaves for commercial use to satisfy growing demands posed by data-hungry gadgets and services.

The Pentagon had pointed to its own need for airwaves as its use of drones and other reliance on wireless technology grows. It also had estimated the process of moving its programs to new frequencies would cost more than $12 billion.

Under the new plan, the Defense Department drops the cost estimate to $3.5 billion by compromising on sharing slices of airwaves without completely clearing any of the spectrum bands.

In the letter, originally sent on July 17 to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which oversees federal airwaves, DOD Chief Information Officer Teresa Takai called the proposal "a workable balance to provide access to the 1755-1780 MHz band most desired by the commercial wireless industry while ensuring no loss of critical DoD capabilities."

The NTIA, in its own letter to the FCC, said it had not had enough time to review the proposal and could not yet endorse it.

The FCC, with NTIA's help, is preparing for several auctions of airwaves to take place in coming years, including one that would sell off chunks of federally controlled spectrum. They will be the first reshuffling of airwave ownership since 2008.

Congress has required the FCC to auction off the 2155-2180 MHz band by February 2015 and the industry has sought to pair up that slice of spectrum with the valuable 1755-1780 MHz band, arguing it would collect more money. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives have introduced a bill to ensure such pairing.

The FCC has been drafting a notice of proposed rulemaking that would seek public comments on how the FCC should auction those federally owned or already cleared airwaves to the wireless companies and an FCC official said the agency's notice will address the Pentagon's new proposal.

President Barack Obama last month directed federal agencies to look for ways eventually to give up or share more of their airwaves with the private sector. This followed his June 2010 call to open up 500 MHz of federal spectrum for commercial use.

Although the Defense Department's move marks the first big concession by the military for upcoming auctions, the proposal leaves a number of questions unaddressed, including how long the military's programs would remain in the current bands and how the plan may complicate future attempts to clear the spectrum now used by the government.

The DOD did not immediately have a comment.

"While there are many details that need to be resolved, this is a significant breakthrough toward meeting the goal of licensing this spectrum, paired with 2155-2180 MHz, by February 2015," said Steve Sharkey, director of government affairs for technology and engineering policy at T-Mobile USA.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663301/s/2f1107f0/sc/1/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Ctechnology0Cswitch0Eus0Emilitary0Eoffers0Eshare0Espectrum0Ewireless0Eindustry0E6C10A722339/story01.htm

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Goodbye, Darkness: Light Pollution Is Making Us Forget the Night Sky

Did you know that eight of every ten kids born today won?t experience a night sky dark enough to see the Milky Way? We?re living in an age when light pollution is making stars a rarity?and not just in cities. Paul Bogard, the author of a new book on darkness, even goes so far as to describe it as a natural resource.

The Trouble with iTunes on the Mac and Windows

The Trouble with iTunes on the Mac

For a company that prides itself on providing a top-notch user experience, Apple ought to hang its head in shame for the disaster that iTunes has turned into. It's a bloated, piggish, unreliable mess. It's the application we love to hate. It's the application that some of us just hate. But we put up with it. Because we have no choice.

A Brief history of iTunes

iTunes started life simply enough - it was a tool that we used to listen to music. "Rip. Mix. Burn." That was Apple's simple message - rip the music you already owned on CD into digital music files. Create your own playlists. And burn CDs containing your music so you could listen to them elsewhere.

Rip. Mix. Burn.

Then the iPod came along and everything changed. Suddenly we no longer used iTunes just to rip and mix our music, but also to move it to this device that fit in our pockets and stored a thousand albums. iTunes was fun to use, too - you could sort music by genre, rate the songs you liked, and drill down with terrific levels of detail, assuming it was available in the metadata - stuff like composer, release date and more.

The iPod grew and so did our music collections. Many of us began to look for other ways to get music, through file sharing services and other means. So Apple's next step, the iTunes Store, made a lot of sense. It made it easier to get music online, and it provided musicians and their labels with a revenue stream.

But the iTunes Store introducing another layer of complexity into iTunes - now we weren't just using iTunes to store and catalog our music, but to buy it as well. And that meant incorporating copy protection into the mix - Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

When Apple introduced iPods to be able to run applications and watch video, the iTunes Store - and the iTunes app - again increased in complexity. You could do so much more with iTunes than you could before. You could grab movies and TV shows. Copy protected using the same DRM scheme as music - Apple called it FairPlay. Eventually FairPlay copy protection disappeared for music, but it's lingered for movies and TV shows.

Then the iPhone came along, and eventually the iPod touch and the iPad followed. And suddenly the iTunes Store grew more in complexity - now it was selling apps through an App Store. Apple decided to take on Amazon and the Kindle by offering ebooks, which added another layer onto iTunes. And so on, and so on.

iTunes Match

The latest addition is iTunes Match, Apple's $25/year service that makes your iTunes music library available in the cloud, downloadable to any device authorized to play it. And when iOS 7 debuts this fall you'll be able to listen to iTunes Radio, streaming content that is ad-free if you're an iTunes Match subscriber.

iTunes has become a shambling monstrosity

One can't fault Apple for continually trying to add more features to iTunes. But iTunes has become a wall with many layers of wallpaper stuck to it, each glued and layered on top of the last. Eventually they have to come off, and what you're left with is a wall that needs to be refinished before it can be repainted.

The net result is that iTunes does a lot of things, but does them poorly. The interface has become needlessly complex, and attempts to refine and improve it have largely failed as a result. iTunes is the one Mac app that drives your experience with music, downloading television shows, movies and apps. It's trying to do too much. It needs to do much less. As a result, even the name "iTunes" has lost its meaning - "tunes" are only a small part of the app's overall function.

For my part, I have a seemly endless variety of problems with iTunes. With over 23,000 files, iTunes crashes for me frequently and is terribly slow. I lost last weekend trying to download my iTunes library from iTunes Match, after the machine that held my original library went out for repair. The entire weekend. Because iTunes kept crashing and stopping the download.

iTunes quit unexpectedly - quelle surprise

iTunes Match enables me to download music when I'm on my phone when I'm out, but often forgets about album art. iTunes Match on the Mac is far from perfect, too - it has, for no good reason, keeping me from downloading dozens of tracks that I've uploaded. They're grayed out, and Apple hasn't been able to fix it for me (and logging out and logging back in hasn't helped).

Music I can't download

iTunes' duplicate finding capability is miserable. And it often can't find the cover art I'm looking for, or substitutes something else entirely in its place. It's little wonder that utilities like TuneUp exist - they have to, because Apple's done such a poor job with iTunes, some users need help sorting their iTunes libraries.

Time to break up the party

"True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation," explained Apple senior vice president of Design Jony Ive in the intro video for iOS 7. "It's about bringing order to complexity."

I think it's time for Apple to look at iTunes and start over with a fresh sheet of paper. Just admit that this horrible thing isn't working any more and try something entirely new. Ideally, I'd like to see music, apps, and videos broken up into separate utilities.

"Complexity" is a word that describes the iTunes experience to a tee. Hopefully once iOS 7 is out the door, Ive can put his eyes and his best minds to work on the problem of iTunes, because right now it's embarrassing for Apple to be promoting and distributing this software. It's the antithesis of what we expect the Apple user experience to be.

Do you hate iTunes as much as I do? Or do you love it? Do you accept it as a necesary evil? Or do you use other utilities entirely? Let me know in the comments.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/vzW_3a7aEa4/story01.htm

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Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Global shares directionless amid poor Europe data

PARIS (AP) ? Global shares struggled to find direction Tuesday as indications Europe's economy is still in trouble competed with hopes that the U.S. central bank wasn't quite finished with its stimulus.

Industrial producer prices fell 0.3 percent in May in the 17 European Union countries that use the euro, Eurostat reported Tuesday. While that shows costs are falling, it also indicates manufacturing activity remains weak.

Meanwhile, Spain announced Tuesday that the number of people registered as unemployed dropped for a fourth consecutive month in June ? but the country has a long way to go to bring its jobless rate down to normal levels. It currently stands at 27.2 percent.

A separate report on Monday showed the unemployment rate in the eurozone was at 12.1 percent in May, its highest level ever.

"While the European economy appears to be starting to show flickers of recovery particularly in Spain and Italy where the manufacturing sector appears to be showing signs of coming off life support, the unemployment picture remains disturbingly high," said Michael Hewson, a market analyst at CMC Markets UK.

By midday in Europe, France's CAC-40 was down 0.9 percent to 3,735 while the DAX in Germany was off 1.2 percent to 7,885. The FTSE index of British shares dropped 0.6 percent at 6,269.

By contrast, lackluster data in the U.S. comforted American and many Asian markets over the past day ? since it indicated the U.S. Federal Reserve would move slowly to reduce its purchases of financial assets that have buoyed markets by pushing down interest rates.

On Monday, Wall Street rallied after an ISM manufacturing survey for the U.S. that showed a weak rebound in June thanks to new orders and higher production. The survey boosted stock markets as investors estimated it was strong enough to show the recovery is on track, but not so strong as to encourage the Fed to start ending its monetary stimulus program ahead of time.

U.S. markets were expected to open higher Tuesday. Dow and S&P futures were both up 0.2 percent, at 14,914 1,610.20 respectively.

Many Asian stocks rose earlier in the day. Tokyo's Nikkei 225, the region's heavyweight index, jumped 1.8 percent to 14,098.74. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was up 2.6 percent at 4,834.00 after the country's central bank left interest rates unchanged and said the Australian dollar is likely to continue falling, easing pressure on exports.

In China, the Shanghai Composite Index reversed early losses to rise 0.6 percent to 2,006.56 after reports on Monday that Chinese manufacturing weakened in June amid a credit crunch. Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 0.7 percent to 20,658.65, led by Chinese banks, which are facing central bank credit restrictions.

Meanwhile, benchmark oil for August delivery rose 16 cents to $98.15 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $1.43 to close at $97.99 a barrel on Monday.

The euro fell to $1.3030 from $1.3065 late Monday in New York.

___

Associated Press writer Kay Johnson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/global-shares-directionless-amid-poor-europe-data-103341981.html

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