wild

Do you spend more time with a computer, smartphone, or tablet than your significant other? Your life serves as the elementary premise for a futuristic love story, "Her," in which the film's star, Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with an interactive operating system.

The movie, directed by Spike Jonze and made in collaboration with Annapurna Pictures, also stars it girls Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, and Olivia Wilde. … Read more

PENASCO, N.M. -- After five years of enduring Internet access that provided dial-up speeds for uploading and rarely exceeded 1Mbps down, I now cruise along in my home office on the edge of a wilderness area at 7.5Mbps for downloads. My uploads are 30 times faster at 1.5Mbps.

The path to my recent broadband liberation began on a day last fall when that slow satellite connection went dark for an entire day. A malfunction with the satellite literally caused it to shut down and turn away from the Earth. In the process of reporting the story for CNET, I came across a tangentially related tidbit about the launch of a new satellite, called ViaSat-1, which would soon be in orbit and providing new speed and capacity for my satellite Internet provider (WildBlue, which is a subsidiary of ViaSat).

I shared the good news with my family, but didn't plan to hold my breath for the upgrade to trickle down anytime soon through the layers of middlemen and resellers standing between that beautiful new bird in orbit and my Wi-Fi router. If you've read the rest of this week-long series or live in the sticks yourself, you know how new and exciting infrastructure can remain out of grasp, even when it's physically so close to home.… Read more

As if Buffalo Wild Wings wasn't already great enough, the popular sports bar is now testing iPads as on-table ordering systems for its restaurants, giving customers the ability to choose their meals and pay for them without having to wait.

The iPads are being tested in Toronto and soon Minneapolis. Apple's tablet is encased in a rugged Hubworks case and can be used for more than just ordering your food. Facebook, Twitter, and interactive games are all part of the experience.

Tim Murphy, director of international business for Buffalo Wild Wings, told Computer World, "Ultimately, we are … Read more

Ah, the Old West. Things were simpler (and a lot more dangerous) back then.

Your main means of transportation was your horse, a vast frontier was open to explore, and problems were solved with a six-shooter. At least, that's what it was like in the movies. But now you can bring that world and mentality to your iPhone.

This week's collection of iOS apps: sharp-shootin' cowboy games. The first is a target shooter with extra elements that make it extra fun. The second is a dual-stick shooter with missions and evil bosses to gun down. The third lets you explore a huge and open 3D world on horseback--and it won't cost you any gold (or cash) at all.… Read more

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

My office today is a bar overlooking the historic Taos plaza in New Mexico and my Internet access comes courtesy of tethered Verizon 3G (don't tell!) service. That's all because my normal ISP has been out of commission since early this morning thanks to a major satellite malfunction that's also impacting all sorts of services, from ATMs to flights in Canada's northern territories.

Telesat's Anik F2 satellite experienced a "technical anomaly" beginning at about 3:30 a.m. PT today, according to a release from the Ottawa-based company. The anomaly is reportedly that … Read more

Of all SATA 3-based solid-state drives (SSDs) CNET has reviewed, the Patriot WildFire offers the wildest performance.

On the one hand, it didn't excel in file-transferring tests where we time how long a drive takes to copy files from one place to another. But on the other, it did much better with application performance than its peers. This singles the drive out from the rest and means that when used as the main drive that hosts an operating system and applications, the WildFire increases the overall performance by reducing the time needed for an application to load and finish … Read more

Whether you're dressing up for Halloween, putting on a play, or doing something else that involves creepy appearances, there are plenty of ways to achieve gruesome effects with common household items. Makeup FX is an e-book that details some techniques for simulating injuries and all kinds of other yucky stuff. It's definitely not a comprehensive guide, but it's not bad if you need some basic tips.

Makeup FX is really just a set of HTML files that can be viewed with any browser; it's like a Web site that's hosted on your own computer instead … Read more

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, CEO Steve Jobs had an embarrassing onstage moment when he lost his Wi-Fi connection during his keynote presentation as he tried to download files to demo the difference in screen quality between an iPhone 3GS and the new iPhone 4.

The download failed, and his demo crashed on the new iPhone 4 because he couldn't maintain a solid Wi-Fi connection.

Certainly not the optimal time for a demo to fail, but at least now Jobs knows how iPhone users feel every day, as we suffer with AT&T's poor cellular network performance. And it should be pointed out that device tethering between attendees' laptops and cell phones may well have reduced these issues, if only AT&T allowed users to tether.

After the initial crash, Jobs later came back and asked people to turn off their access points (as in their MiFi, which is a line of compact wireless routers produced by Novatel Wireless that act as mobile Wi-Fi hot spots).

Jobs claimed that there were 570 of them in that hall. As Sam Diaz at ZDNet pointed out, "The problem is that if 10 percent of the 5,000 people in an audience create their own Wi-Fi networks in that room, there are now 500+ 'networks' all competing for the same wireless spectrum to transmit those signals--including the original Wi-Fi networks that the presenter has established in the room."

After some time, as he pressured more people to turn off their cell phones and put their laptops to sleep, he managed to do the demo. CNET's own Rafe Needleman made the excellent point that your bad network is not my problem on his ProPR Tips blog.

It's understandable that Jobs would get upset about something not working in a demo, but it's shocking that the company didn't set up a special network for him, instead hoping for the best on a consistently flaky Moscone Center Wi-Fi network. And, of course, the demand for everyone to comply in their own best interest to see the demo is so typically egotistical of Apple that it's not even shocking anymore. … Read more