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Thirty percent of young people text while driving

Despite all the warnings about using a cell phone behind the wheel, many drivers, especially younger ones, still seem to be clueless about the danger, or willing to risk it anyway.

A majority of 63 percent of people under 30 admitted to using a cell phone while driving in the past 30 days, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by Consumer Reports as part of a story for its April issue. Further, 30 percent of those also said they texted behind the wheel during the same period.

Those numbers compare with 41 percent of those over 30 … Read more

AT&T not surprised by level of iPhone defectors

Just how many subscribers have ditched AT&T since the carrier lost its exclusive hold on the iPhone to Verizon?

AT&T is mum on specific numbers, but a top executive has offered this hazy assessment: the company isn't surprised by the level of defections.

Speaking yesterday at a Morgan Stanley technology conference in San Francisco, Ralph de la Vega, head of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said his company hasn't seen any surprises in customer defections and that "everything is pretty much within our expectations," according to a Webcast of his … Read more

LaCie announces Thunderbolt external hard drive

Intel announced a completely new I/O peripheral protocol today called Thunderbolt, which had previously gone by the code name Light Peak. In a nutshell, Thunderbolt is a superfast peripheral standard with the speed of 10Gbps (1.25GBps) and almost no overhead. This means devices can be connected at a real-word throughput speed of around 1.25GBps. Thunderbolt is compatible with DisplayPort 1.1 and later.

Currently, the technology is available only in Apple's new MacBook Pro (which comes with one Thunderbolt port) and can be used only with DisplayPort devices, such as Apple's Cinema display. But that will change soon.

Today, LaCie announced an external hard drive, the LaCie Little Big Disk, that will be one of the first storage devices to support Thunderbolt technology. A prototype of the drive was used at the Intel demo today. The Little Big Disk has two solid-state drives inside.

The drive comes with two Thunderbolt ports and can be used to daisy-chain with other Thunderbolt-enabled devices, such as a display or additional storage device.… Read more

MPEG LA patent move blemishes Google's Web video plan

A serious complication has just emerged for Google's plan for high-quality, patent-free, open-source video on the Web--but Google also revealed plans today to try to counteract it.

MPEG LA, an organization that licenses video-related patents related to a variety of standards, has formally requested for patent owners to inform them of patents they believe Google's VP8 technology uses.

In "offer[ing] to facilitate development of a joint license to provide coverage under essential patents," MPEG LA is taking a major step toward actually offering such a license.

That might reassure some players who are interested in … Read more

The backlash over Google's HTML5 video bet

Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant.

It was hard to miss the response that accompanied Google's announcement earlier this week that it no longer planned to support the H.264 codec for the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in order to focus on the WebM technology. Depending on what you read, Google is either evil, brilliant, hypocritical, cunning, principled, or confused in dropping support for H.264, … Read more

Google yanking H.264 video out of Chrome

Google just fired a broadside in the Web's codec wars.

With its alternative WebM video-encoding technology now entering the marketplace, Google announced plans today to remove built-in Chrome support for a widely used rival codec called H.264 favored by Apple and Microsoft. The move places Google instead firmly in the camp of browser makers Mozilla and Opera, who ardently desire basic Web technologies to be unencumbered by patent restrictions.

"Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed … Read more

Faulty iPhone alarms cause Lakers to lose?

Playing in the NBA is a high-pressure, neurotic experience.

You are so tall that the public glares at you even when you're not on the court. This apparently means you must get the appropriate amount of sleep--not too much, not too little--in order to perform your best.

It seems that three members of the Los Angeles Lakers relied on their iPhone alarms on Sunday to wake them at the perfect moment. And their iPhones let them down so badly that the Lakers then let their fans down by performing like sleepwalking oddities against the Memphis Grizzlies.

According to ESPN.com, … Read more

LaCie FastKey review: Fast, furiously expensive

What do you get when you put solid-state storage, USB 3.0 connectivity, and a thumb-size design together? Well, you'll get LaCie's FastKey.

This is a unique portable storage solution that uses the fastest technology in terms of storage type (solid state) and peripheral connectivity (USB 3.0). On top of that, the device is about the size of a large thumb drive but offers up to 120GB of storage space.

Unfortunately, for the quite obvious reasons stated above (namely is high-end functionality), it isn't cheap; the LaCie FastKey costs $475 for the 120GB version. The drive … Read more

Are video games art? 2010 edition

While the role of the professional critic in the realm of books, film, music, or art is well-established, for interactive entertainment the lines are less clear. As a (relatively) young medium, questions about how to actually write about video games are still being hashed out, by consumers, fans, bloggers, established media critics, and others.

The default to date has been to consider a work of interactive entertainment as a packaged consumer product--hence game reviews that focus on the number of levels, hours of gameplay, and other technical details. I am more inclined to consider a game as a cultural or … Read more