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Tuesday, February 24, 2009 - Posts
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It's an intriguing idea: instead of piping sound directly into your ear so you can listen to an audio source, you can use the bones in your skull to transmit the sound. That's the concept behind the Audio Bone, an $190 set of headphones that impressed us at CES. Since your ears are free, you can listen for incoming traffic while you bike, or you can take advantage of the watertight design and go swimming with your favorite songs.
In practice however, the headphones fail to live up to the promise. Having a review sample in my home allowed me to put the Audio Bone through a more rigorous testing process, and I found that all the things that excited me about the product failed in practical use.
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When I wrote a cover story on Amazon.com in summer of 2000, Can Amazon Make It?, I was uncomfortable with the implication of the cover language that there was a good chance Amazon wouldn't make it. Although Amazon clearly faced... 
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Today's Gmail outage naturally raised questions about the reliability of trusting mission-critical applications to the vagaries of cloud computing. But just how bad a blow to Gmail's reliability was the outage, which Google puts at 2 1/2 hours, but user... 
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The European Union's antitrust investigation team has released preliminary statements on how it will rule on the question of whether Microsoft abused its
dominant market position to push the adoption of Internet Explorer; the remarks are not encouraging. The investigation is not over—Microsoft still has time to
issue its own formal response to further concerns the EU raised in January—but the company may need a Hail Mary pass to escape the penalty the EU is prepared to
level.
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When I read that Motorola has sold its Good Technology division today, an alarm went off in my head. Good Technology staffers have been at the heart of Android development at Motorola. For months now, they've been working on new phones built around the Android operating system, developed by a slew of companies including Google. Motorola's execs have touted Android-based phones as their future, as the products that will pull the company out of the mess it is in. But now, Motorola is selling Good? What is going on? 
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One of the biggest downsides to playing most games is their lack of portability. Generally, you have to sit in front of the same screen on which you launched the game until you've finished or gotten too tired to play.... 
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Although the big Microsoft-based excitement (if that's the right word) at Mobile World Congress was focused on Windows Mobile 6.5, Redmond also announced its My Phone service. The basic concept is simple: My Phone syncs data between your phone and the Web.
The beta client is currently available only for Windows Mobile phones, though there are rumors that other phone platforms will be added after the 1.0 release. Installing and configuring the client takes only a few moments, and before too long the syncing can take place.
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Plucky Meraki, a San Francisco mesh networking startup, is stepping up to play with the big boys with the introduction of its $1,499 MR58 WiFi router. Designed for outdoor use, the MR58 has three separate 802.11n radios each of which can be used for front-end networks or backhaul, while meshing with nearby networks. Both omnidirectional and directional antennas can be separately used with each radio.
Comparable products from competitors list for $5,000 (street, over $3,000) not including back-end management hardware, and lack the 802.11n support for distance and throughput.
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Gmail service seems to be mostly restored after a major worldwide failure took it down for more than three hours this morning. Although a status update on the Gmail support page says "the problem is now resolved," lots of... 
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The EU-Intel antitrust throwdown continues, with Intel confirming that it had responded to the EU's SSO (Supplementary Statement of Objections) earlier this month on February 5. The
European Commission filed its SSO back in July of 2008, but Intel requested multiple extensions to the initial two-week reply deadline.
Last fall, the CPU manufacturer
requested that the Directorate General for Competition force AMD to reveal certain additional documents that Intel claimed would prove its innocence. After
several rounds of conversation, DG-COMP produced seven documents Intel was able to identify, but the company wanted more and filed suit with the Court of First
Instance requesting that it be given access to all of the documentation it deemed necessary.
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After nearly six years in business, Google's Gmail is still officially classified as "beta." Maybe there's a reason. The service has suffered an embarrassing string of breakdowns lately and htis morning appears to be entirely unavailable. No word from Google... 
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Creating an RTS title and setting it in the world of Halo may seem like a cheap way to make some cash, but the Halo series has long enjoyed a deeper backstory than many realize. If you've read the enjoyable—if pulpy—novels and noticed how many recognizable units and vehicles the past Halo games have contained, creating an RTS experience starts to make sense. Plus, when you see your first Spartan in the game, accompanied by the series' music, it's hard not to get pulled back into the experience. In short, Halo has the depth to mine for a game of this kind.
Besides, why not try to create a real-time strategy game for the consoles, built from the ground up to use the Xbox 360's controller? While nothing will ever beat the mouse and the keyboard for granular control of your units and base, Ensemble did a bang-up job with the controller. With a little practice and a tutorial, you'll be able to jump around the battlefield, select your units, and send specific commands with ease. So why does it feel like Halo Wars is barely half the game it could have been?
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