speed

In 2011, Loris Elementary School in Loris, S.C., was ranked 41st in the state among grammar schools with similar demographics. By 2012, it had risen to 19th.

What happened? According to the White House: technology.

Many of the students at Loris Elementary School are from low-income families that don't have the means to give their children all of today's high-tech devices, according to the Obama administration. That's why in 2012 the school decided to introduce a technology blended learning program complete with laptops, software, and Internet access. It's apparently made a difference.

President Barack Obama … Read more

Editor's note: See update at the bottom of this post.

A developer who provides iPhone hacks claims to have discovered code in iOS that suggests Apple is helping the top three U.S. wireless carriers throttle data speeds for all iPhone and iPad customers.

Joseph Brown, operator of the Web site iTweakiOS, claimed -- in a post that has since been taken down -- to have discovered code on iPhones and iPads operating on Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint that effectively caps the data speeds that can be achieved on the carriers' networks. Brown took snapshots of the … Read more

At the moment, sending data via fiber means blasting a light signal down the line. The farther you want the data to travel, the more power you need to put into the light beam. However, higher-power data signals can actually interact with the material of the fiber line, getting noise degradation into the signal.

The researchers, working out of Bell Laboratories and led by Xiang Liu, tried a technique similar to the way noise-cancelling headphones work to improve the data signal quality across longer distances.

Instead of one light beam, two beams that are mirror images of each other are sent through the fiber. Each beam will gather noise per usual, but that distortion will also be mirrored, so when the two beams are recombined at their destination, the noise is cancelled out. … Read more

How can the Internet be brought to areas that have no infrastructure for high-speed wireless? Beam the Wi-Fi networks down from flying objects, of course.

Google is reportedly working on creating wireless networks for more remote parts of the world, such as countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, with sky-bound balloons and blimps, according to Wired.

Dubbed "high-altitude platforms," these mechanisms will reportedly be able to connect roughly a billion more people to the Internet worldwide, according to Wired. The blimps signals are said to be able to reach people in areas that are hundreds of square … Read more

Most people probably associate Ethernet with a simple cable cinched with phone-like jacks. But, Ethernet is so much more.

It is the foundation for global Internet access and undoubtedly the world's most-used connectivity technology. In the annals of "techdom," Ethernet is a very big deal.

"Ethernet ranks highly among those technologies that impact day-to-day life on a global basis," IEEE Standards Association writes on its Web site. "Data center networks, PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and now the smart grid, smart meters, personal medical devices, the Internet of Things, connected cars, and more -- Ethernet … Read more

Already known for its speed, Google just boosted Chrome's Web site rendering speed by another 5 percent.

The latest stable release of the browser, Chrome 27 (download for Windows, Mac, or Linux), received the small improvement by managing its resources better. To boil down the jargon, the browser's internal resource scheduler now favors more critical resources over preloaded sites.

Chrome engineer James Simonsen wrote in the company's blog announcing the update Tuesday that, across the hundreds of millions of people using Chrome, the amount of time saved equals around 510 years per week. But what we're … Read more

Unlike other driving simulators, Speed Parking 3D is unusual in that the player can only park the car.

At less than 10MB this is most likely the smallest driving simulator available. It features 3D graphics and fully-functional controls. Unfortunately all the controls are touch based and do not respond to tilting the device or shaking it. While Speed Parking 3D has cheesy graphics and generic background sound effects, it is still entertaining. It has very predictable, intuitive controls, yet they are slightly unrealistic. The game has obvious goals and the user requires no instructions to start playing. There's no … Read more

If you live in Kansas City, have Google Fiber, and also own an iPad -- you're in luck. As of Tuesday, the Google Fiber TV app for iPad is available in Apple's iTunes store.

Just what does this app do?

Well, besides doubling as a TV remote control, it also lets users search for programming, browse listings, access on-demand content, and pick shows or recordings to watch. The app also lets users watch any of these shows or movies directly on their iPad.

The Google Fiber TV app has been available to Android owners for about a month … Read more

Windows 7 Manager is an all-in-one system cleaner, tweaker, and maintenance tool that, among other capabilities, incorporates a wide range of "fixes," many of them built into Windows, yet tucked away in odd corners that make them difficult for ordinary users to access. That's sometimes because inexperienced users who misuse a fix or a tweak can cause more problems than they started with. Windows 7 Manager is a good example: It probably packs more features than any tool of its type we've seen thus far. Yet with so many things to run, inexperienced users can end … Read more