nets

Best Buy chimes in with MacBook, laptop deals

Best Buy is doing its part to make MacBooks more affordable--and also offering decent deals on Windows laptops.

11.6-inch MacBook Air: In the shadow of Apple's Black Friday deals, Best Buy is striving to stand out with better deals. And it's succeeding in some cases. For instance, the retailer is selling the 11.6-inch MacBook Air with an Intel Core i5 chip, 2GB Memory, and 64GB solid-state drive (model: MC968LL/A) for $849--that's about $50 less than Apple's Black Friday $898 sale price. (And note that MacMall has been selling a 2010 11.6-inch MacBook Air for $799.)… Read more

Off the grid? No cat videos or Netflix for you

NICE, Calif.--The ads promise high-speed satellite Internet with "speeds that leave dial-up in the dust." What they don't tell you is that if you want a truly 2011 Internet experience--including a steady diet of cat videos and movies streamed from Netflix--you're almost certainly out of luck.

Having spent some time recently at my mother-in-law's mountaintop property in a very remote part of Northern California, I found myself snowed in and unable to return home. And that forced me to confront the reality of what Internet is like for those who live off the grid. … Read more

Box.net wants a developer army 100K strong

Box.net announced today a project called Box Innovation Network, which taps into developer communities and cloud technology partners to encourage development of enterprise software. The goal is to create a "vibrant ecosystem" for enterprise like Facebook did for social.

That's ambitious. A network for cloud-based software isn't nearly as spine-tingling as a new social network.

"Nothing will be cooler [than Facebook] for sharing photos with my grandmother and this isn't as sexy as daily deals," says Aaron Levie, the energetic CEO and founder of Box.net (now going by "Box"). &… Read more

Steve Jobs prevails over Adobe's Flash

week in review Steve Jobs apparently was right about Adobe Systems' Flash.

The company this week announced it is abandoning its work on a mobile version of the Flash Player and will now concentrate its mobile software development efforts on HTML5. The move breaks with what had been Adobe's defiant embrace of its venerable Flash technology, a symbol of its strength on desktop PCs, in the face of the surging adoption of a wide variety of powerful mobile devices, from the iPad to countless smartphones.

But the cancellation wasn't a complete surprise. Flash has plenty of opponents, and … Read more

Senate upholds FCC's Net neutrality regulations

An effort on Capitol Hill to overturn the federal government's controversial Net neutrality regulations failed today.

By a 46-52 vote, the U.S. Senate rejected a Republican-backed proposal that would have lifted the regulations before they take effect on November 20.

This morning's vote was an anticlimactic affair. A veto threat two days earlier from President Obama, coupled with evidence that there was nowhere near a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers, meant that the repeal effort would fail.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted the regulations by a 3-2 party line vote last December. Once they take effect, broadband … Read more

Senate to vote Thursday on repeal of Net neutrality

Following a debate along party lines on Net neutrality today, the Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to repeal a Federal Communications Commission rule banning fixed-line broadband providers from blocking Web sites or unreasonably discriminating against them.

Democrats argue that Net neutrality rules are necessary to make sure that telcos treat Web sites and content providers equally, regardless of the type of data being transmitted, and to ensure that they do not give preferential treatment to those who pay more.

Republicans oppose the rules the FCC adopted by a 3-2 party line vote last December, arguing that the FCC lacked … Read more

Obama threatens to veto Net neutrality repeal

The White House today threatened to veto a proposal to overturn the federal government's controversial Net neutrality regulations.

Opponents of the rules, which the Federal Communications Commission adopted by a 3-2 party line vote last December, have scheduled a Senate vote this week that would lift the regulations before they take effect on November 20.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) said today that the administration's enthusiasm for Internet regulation is another example of its anti-business outlook.

The Internet, she said, "has been the cradle of innovation, it does not have a problem, and it does not need … Read more

Android browser bumps Opera for No. 2 spot

Google's mobile browser leapfrogged Opera Mini to take the second-place spot in worldwide usage of the Web with smartphones and tablets in October.

The change, revealed in Net Applications' monthly browser usage statistics, reflects the shift from older phone operating systems where Opera Mini is more popular to Android. But while Google's unbranded browser rose in the rankings, from 16.3 percent in September to 18.7 percent in October, top-ranked Apple rose even more.

Safari usage rose from 55.6 percent to 62.2 percent, extending its dominance in mobile computing.

Opera Mini plunged from 18.9 … Read more

AT&T backs another panicky report on data capacity

Americans are racing to move the business (and play) of our daily lives on to wireless networks so quickly that the networks may not be able to keep up much longer. At least that's what one new industry-backed report threatens warns.

The new report is out today from the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California at San Diego. The paper and its author, UCSD fellow and infrastructure expert Michael Kleeman, lay out some dizzying figures on the growing stresses placed on mobile networks--including those below and in the box to the right.

To keep up with demand, U.S. wireless networks have traditionally doubled their capacity every 30 months, but this trend may not keep up with future demand... the volume of data traffic on U.S. networks is expected to increase by 1,800 percent over the next four years.

The report says the inevitable result of demand outstripping capacity so dramatically will be painful network congestion.

"We must understand and accept the trade-offs we will face for the convenience of accessing limited wireless capacity," report author Kleeman says in a statement. "Alternatively, as citizens we need to dramatically lower our expectations for wireless services in the future."… Read more