Author: Serkadis

Radiance of the Seas begins the season with 12 short cruises from San Diego, four- and five-night itineraries with calls at Cabo San Lucas and, on the longer itinerary, Ensenada. Vacationers can choose among 15 longer sailings starting in November, ranging from nine- to 11-night roundtrip itineraries that include ports of call such as Acapulco, Cabo San Lucas, Ensenada, Huatulco, Ixtapa (Zihuatanejo), Manzanillo, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta.

Vacationers also can avoid the stresses and messes this holiday season on Radiance of the Seas’. A special nine-night Thanksgiving cruise, sailing on November 21, 2009, will feature a call at Manzanillo on Thanksgiving Day, the cruise line’s first return to the port since 1999. Holiday revelers also can choose a 12-night holiday cruise departing December 21, 2009, when guests will celebrate Christmas and herald in the New Year onboard on the same cruise.

Deployed to Los Angeles in February 2009, Mariner of the Seas offers vacationers a seven-night Mexican Riviera itinerary year-round as the largest and most innovative cruise ship to be based in the Pacific Ocean. Ports of call include Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta. Mariner of the Seas recently won the silver award in Travel Weekly 2009 Magellan Awards for ‘Overall Contemporary Ship’ and is among Royal Caribbean’s Voyager class of ships, known for revolutionizing the cruise industry in the ‘90s by introducing an onboard rock-climbing wall, ice-skating rink, and the Royal Promenade – a boulevard running nearly the length of the ship that is lined with lounges, stores and restaurants, including a Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop.

Guests of both ships will enjoy Royal Caribbean’s award-winning Broadway-style musical revues from Royal Caribbean Productions, multiple onboard bars, lounges and discos throughout the ship, and Vegas-style gaming in the Casino Royale. The ships’ onboard Day Spa also offers a full range of rejuvenating treatments, and the adults-only Solarium pool provides a more relaxing environment. On international sailings, guests also enjoy select popular food, beverage and entertainment options found in the region of their cruise.

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For the first time, Apple won’t be at the annual Macworld trade show, scheduled this year for Feb. 9-13. But CEO Steve Jobs and his team will still make the next few months interesting. Apple has scheduled a press briefing for Jan. 26 in San Francisco, and Apple watchers are salivating at the prospect of a tablet computer that looks like an iPhone on steroids.

A MacInsider report that Apple registered the domain name islate.com at least as far back as 2007 fueled rumors that the tablet may be named iSlate. While Apple has steadfastly refused to comment on the rumors, there is a consensus among the Apple cognoscenti that the device will be a 10-inch-wide tablet, not much thicker than an iPhone, feature the same multi-touch screen as the iPhone and iPod touch, be keyboard-free, and support music, video, e-books and iPhone apps. The price is rumored to be around $800.

The iSlate is exciting not just Apple “fanboys” but also Wall Street. Apple’s stock has reached unknown heights in recent weeks as the rumor mills started going crazy. The stock price has risen from $192 on Dec. 18 to about $211 on New Year’s Eve, giving the company a market capitalization of $190 billion.

Is Content King?

There are also rumors that Apple is cutting content deals with publishers, broadcasters and movie studios, suggesting Apple intends its device to be a Kindle killer. An influential review in The New Yorker magazine panned Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader and said reading books on the iPod touch was a superior experience.

Is the crazed enthusiasm appropriate? Will consumers really flock to Apple stores to pay close to $1,000 — far more than a Kindle — just to watch YouTube videos on a larger screen? Some analysts believe that by cutting content deals, Apple could…

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More customers chose to point and click rather than park and swipe this Christmas season, with a five percent increase in online shopping over the same period last year, a study by the Internet marketing firm comScore says. By comparison, in-store retail shopping grew only 3.6 percent, according to credit-card spending tracked by Mastercard Advisor’s’ Spending Pulse.

“Overall this year, we have seen increasing stability in spending, as opposed to the free fall of 2008,” noted Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis for SpendingPulse.

Cyber Monday A Success

Cyber Monday, the day after the Thanksgiving weekend when online retailers usually offer their best deals and, often, free shipping, raked in $885 million, up five percent from last year’s $834 million.

A significant share of the online boost was in electronics sales, which grew by slightly more than 20 percent, with jewelry and watches also producing solid sales. Overall, an estimated $27 billion was spent online.

Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association, attributed the sales boost to better marketing and promotion by retailers.

“Sellers are trying different things other than just the usual loss-leader approach,” Koenig said. “They have used a number of market plays old and new to coax consumers to open their wallets, and the data we have so far suggests they have been successful.”

One such successful tactic, Koenig said, is bundling, or selling multiple, related products at one price. For example, he said Best Buy offered a Hewlett-Packard PC, monitor, notebook and netbook, plus a wireless router with home installation for about $1,200.

But he said while unit sales climbed this year, the revenue generated fell because of the abundance of lower-priced items.

“There were fewer large-screen TVs, but more midsize models in the 20- to 30-inch range sold,” he said. “I also think there is some trading down…

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We enter 2010. Older, certainly. Wiser? Well, maybe. Much has happened this past year to change the face of the mobile industry. Mobile broadband has cemented itself as the route to global connectivity. Online Service Providers [OSPs] such as Skype, Facebook, and Apple’s iTunes store have emerged as the key challengers to mobile operators in applications and services. Now we are giving birth to yet another new generation mobile technology, christened LTE for “Long Term Evolution.” What labor pains will we suffer this time around?

Continuing consolidation of the infrastructure vendor community points to the disappearance of further well-known industry brands in the coming years. By contrast, today’s mobile carriers look likely to survive, although some will find tougher going than others.

The industry watchers at Northstream have made predictions on what the year ahead holds for the mobile world. Let’s consider them.

For broadband, the short version is that LTE [the fourth-generation mobile network successor to 3G] is good and HSPA [a high-speed data upgrade to 3G] is great. LTE will indeed be commercially launched in 2010 and it will be surprisingly good, considering that it is new technology. As with all new mobile technologies, confidence about the future will rise once systems are stable, coverage is built out, and a choice of devices is widely available. Our biggest concern for LTE is the shortage of spectrum in lower-frequency bands.

Kindle: A Vertically Inspired Winner

The real blockbuster in 2010 will be HSPA, or High-Speed Packet Access. We know for sure that it adds top-line growth for mobile operators, though we wonder about margins, particularly in the light of the “iPhone impact,” by which carriers transport much more data at typically flat rates. The competition in the HSPA chipset-and-device market is fierce, so look for crashing prices. HSPA connections will exhibit hockey-stick growth, globally…

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The dawn of a new year is a time when people in many parts of the world make wishes for the future. Technology fans are no different. While 2009 was traumatic in the financial world, there were glimmers of hope in technology: the iPhone 3GS continued pushing the boundaries in handhelds; computer technology got smaller, faster, and cheaper; the Internet bubbled with social networking sites. But there are still plenty of areas of technology in which wishes are welcome. Here are a few.

Cheaper Handhelds

Sure, the iPhone and BlackBerry are great devices, allowing you to do everything from check your e-mail to help you find your way to places you’ve never been. But all of this functionality comes at a price — and one that’s simply too high for many. Add up the price of the handheld and the monthly fees from your cell phone provider, your data plan, and perhaps you BlackBerry surcharge, and you’re probably looking at a monthly bill that has you thinking about what other expenses you can cut out of your budget.

Put simply, many people consider handhelds a necessity these days, but that shouldn’t mean that in order to use them, you have to cut your food budget by a week each month. Almost every component of the wireless chain is too expensive: the handhelds themselves, the service fees, the overage fees, and more. What’s called for is either greater competition among carriers and handheld makers or, barring that, greater regulation and oversight. Because handheld devices are becoming as much of a business necessity as computers were ten years ago, we need to ensure that they remain affordable to the majority.

A Solution To Phone Spam

It took almost a decade to get e-mail spam under control, but the struggle ahead seems to be with cell phone spam…

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As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.

TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.

“It literally showed up in my box,” Frischling told The Associated Press. “I do not know who it came from.” He said he provided the agents a signed statement to that effect.

In a Dec. 29 posting on his blog, Elliott said he had told the TSA agents at his house that he would call his lawyer and get back to them. Elliott did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

The TSA declined to say how many people were subpoenaed.

The directive was dated Dec. 25 and was issued after a 23-year-old Nigerian man was charged with attempting to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam. The bomb, which allegedly was hidden in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear, malfunctioned and no one was killed. Authorities said the device included a syringe and a condom-like bag filled with powder that the FBI determined to be PETN, a common explosive.

The…

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Beginning New Year’s Day, Oregon police officers may hear some arguing when they start pulling motorists over for violating a new law banning them from talking on hand-held cell phones while driving.

The new law, passed by the 2009 Oregon Legislature, exempts motorists who are on their hand-held cell phones “in the scope of the person’s employment if operation of the motor vehicle is necessary for the person’s job.” The exemption was intended for taxi drivers, delivery trucks, tow trucks and the like.

Law enforcement officials are getting ready for some motorists to try to drive through that legal loophole by insisting, for example, that a call to a co-worker who also happens to be a friend is really for business purposes.

“There is a gray area,” says Oregon State Police Lt. Gregg Hastings. “It doesn’t clearly define what jobs fall under the exemption. Ultimately, maybe judges are going to have to clarify that.”

With the new law, Oregon joins a half dozen other states that ban drivers from talking on hand-held cell phones while driving. Police officers can pull someone over under the Oregon law and violators face a minimum fine of $142.

However, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that only Oregon has included such a broadly worded exemption. Other states that ban cell phones allow use by emergency responders or tow truck drivers, the industry group says.

“It doesn’t make sense to carve out this exemption if you want the law to have some bite,” spokesman Russ Rader said. “You just make it more likely that drivers will believe that even if they are stopped by a police officer they can get out of getting a ticket.”

Oregon lawmakers were aiming to combat distracted driving when they passed the new cell phone law, which also bans text messaging while driving.

Under the law, drivers…

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DVD sales tumbled this year as the weak economy and competition from the Internet soured consumers on buying new discs. What’s a movie studio to do?

Look to the iPhone to goose sales.

NBC Universal and 20th Century Fox have launched interactive apps that tap into DVD or Blu-ray discs to augment viewing. The apps provide information about the film and stars and connect you with friends to chat about the movie while you watch.

Fox’s FoxPop uses the microphone on your iPhone, or your laptop, to “hear” the audio signal from the movie you’re watching, then responds with pop-ups about the movie. It also intersects with Facebook and Twitter for movie chats.

Universal’s Pocket Blu is just for the iPhone. It turns the device into a remote control for the movie if you watch on a Blu-ray player (it doesn’t work with traditional DVDs or computers) and plays trailers for upcoming movies.

Both apps are on selected movies at first, such as Fox’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and 500 Days of Summer, and Universal’s Funny People and Bruno.

With FoxPop, once you sync the DVD and the iPhone or computer with the app, “We know where you are in the movie,” says Ajay Shah, CEO of start-up Spot411, which created the technology for Fox. “You can actually leave a message for a friend who might watch the movie in the future.”

So instead of tapping him or her on the shoulder in the theater and saying, “Catch this, here’s the funny part,” you can do that with text on the iPhone or computer, Shah says.

You might find that annoying in the theater, but online, it’s a silent tap, he says. “You can either take part or not.”

Creative Packaging

Older viewers might scoff at the idea of adding these apps to DVD and Blu-ray,…

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Vint Cerf, also known as the father of the Internet, warned that we’d run out of IP addresses by 2010. That didn’t happen. Now some pundits are predicting 2012 as the new doom-and-gloom date for the World Wide Web.

No one knows for sure when the original pool of IP addresses will be depleted, but one thing is certain: The continued growth of the Internet and the increasing use of machine-to-machine communications makes it likely — and soon.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell: IP version 4, or IPv4, addresses are allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to regional registries. The registries then allocate IPv4 addresses to individual customers. As it stands, the last free pool at IANA is tracking for September 2011 — and the last address would be offered to an individual customer about a year later, or about 700 days from now.

“As with all scarce resources, occupation of new address resources will slow down as the free pool shrinks, just as oil consumption decreases as the price goes up,” said Dr. Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School Of Information Studies’ Internet Governance Project. “But sooner or later, the free pool will be gone. IPv4 addresses are fixed in number and most of them have already been handed out to organizations and ISPs.”

Exhausting the Pool

Several factors contribute to address scarcity. First, the Internet address space is a fixed quantity, set by the basic Internet protocol standard of 1981. It allows for about four billion unique bit combinations. In the early years of Internet development, address blocks were handed out too easily, Mueller said, because no one knew the Internet would become so large. By 1993, about 40 percent of the addresses had already been given out.

“The regional address registries don’t have effective reclamation…

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Personal computers designed specifically for gamers are getting more powerful and more affordable by the month. They’re bursting with multi-core processors, powerful video graphics cards and plenty of memory to give you the most realistic graphics and action.

Although it should come as no surprise that the computers that can run games consistently well are the ones at the high end of the price spectrum, I found machines for about $1,000 that can give you decent play.

The cheapest ones, though, were disappointing when confronted with complex games that can push a system to its limit.

With prices coming down, PC gamers on the verge of buying a new machine must ask themselves: Does it look cool, and can it run “Crysis”?

“Crysis,” a futuristic first-person shooting game, has steeper hardware requirements than typical games, which already tend to push the boundaries. So if your computer is powerful enough for “Crysis,” it can likely run any game on the market.

The machines that run “Crysis” well have powerful graphics cards and multi-core processors — essentially several processors on a single chip working in synch.

These computers also have a generous amount of random access memory, or RAM, which is key to letting games to run smoothly. The myriad computations a game requires each second are primarily made with data uploaded on the fly to the available RAM on your computer. The more you have, the more data your computer can access quickly.

In my tests, Falcon Northwest delivers the best machines when price is no object.

At $3,856, Falcon Northwest’s diminutive FragBox is a serious ding to the wallet, but it packs twin graphics cards for multiple display support, 12 gigabytes of RAM and an Intel Core i7 processor rated at cool 3.06 gigahertz — all in a box that’s much shorter than the typical tower PC. At…

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These New Year’s resolutions won’t make you look fabulous in time for swimsuit season or add 10 years to your life. Instead, your reward will be a fatter wallet and maybe a cleaner conscience, because this is about saving energy.

You can pay for the bubbly next year with all the money you save.

The average household uses about 20 percent more electricity than it did 20 years ago. Flat-screen televisions, cell phones, video games and iPods can really add up, not to mention much bigger houses.

Here’s how to can tame the energy beast in your home.

1. Get junior to shut off that Xbox when he’s not riding a virtual half pipe or racing through downtown streets in a Formula 1 car.

Video game consoles collectively use as much power as the city of San Diego each year, according to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Ecos Consulting.

Researchers came to that result on the assumption that half of all users leave their consoles on all the time. And the latest machines are big power sponges.

A Sony PlayStation 3 or an Xbox 360 left on 24 hours a day, seven day per week will use as much electricity as two new refrigerators. The Nintendo Wii is a relative power sipper, however.

The study estimates that the annual electricity cost for a PlayStation 3 bought in 2006 that is shut off after use is $15; it’s $160 if the console is left on.

2. Get into the spirit and replace those incandescent holiday lights with a string of LED lights. You’ll save 71 cents for a string that remains lit 10 hours a day for 30 days, according to the Alliance to Save Energy.

It doesn’t sound like much, but throw in 10 or 12 strings of lights to put on your house or a…

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UFC 108 seems like one of those cards that lacks for mainstream appeal and will get a lower buy rate, but will end up being one of the top cards of the year from top to bottom.

The co-headlining fight is between Dustin Hazelett and Paul Daley. Daley is coming off an impressive KO victory in his UFC debut over Martin Kampmann. The fight will take place at a catchweight of 172 pounds because Daley missed wieght. Hazelett has won 2 straight since losing to Josh Koscheck and 5 of 6 overall. Again, a good fight. Submission guy vs. striker.

Here’s the rest of the card.

Joe Lauzon vs. Sam Stout – Fight of the Night
Duane Ludwig vs. Jim Miller – Ludwig is Millers’ third announced opponent.
Junior Dos Santos vs. Gilbert Yvel – Yvel is a bit of a loose cannon.

The SpikeTV Broadcast
Yes, that’s right, part of the undercard will be shown for free at 9pm on Spike.
Martin Kampmann vs. Jacob Volkmann
Dan Lauzon vs. Cole Miller

PRELIMINARY CARD (Un-aired)
Ryan Jensen vs. Mark Munoz
Jake Ellenberger vs. Mike Pyle
Rafaello Oliveira vs. John Gunderson

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Registering a personal Zumbox is simple. First, note that your current Zumbox has already been “personalized” according to the name you have on the account. To register additional Zumboxes, go to Zumbox.com and enter a new name with the same street address. You’ll be immediately notified that a Zumbox is already registered at this address (see photo), and a new security code will be mailed to that person via the USPS. This code has to then be entered at Zumbox.com to secure that mailbox and create a new account. The original Zumbox user at that address will be notified each time a new Zumbox is registered for that address.

One of the major benefits of Zumbox, in particular with this system upgrade, is that you only deal with your mail. A significant part of the so-called junk mail problem is the overwhelming nature of it. You go to your USPS mailbox each day, and it’s a physical chore to sort through everything. This is magnified several times when you have multiple people at the same address receiving mail. It’s very 19th century. In the 21st century, when you open your Zumbox, the only mail you’ll see is your mail. Whether it’s a bill, statement, newsletter, public notice, or special offer, 100% of that mail is intended for you. We see this as a significant improvement on the overall postal mail experience. It is truly Mail 2.0.

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This thing is only 20,000 GBP or about $40K. It uses a Honda Civic R-Type engine with a supercharger. It clearly will kill you sooner than later, although because it’s a car you’re not dealing with the possibility of sliding under a truck. Amazing stuff.

Here’s the product page. If you get one, do tell us what you think?

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Filed under: App Store

On September 27, 2005 Jon Rubinstein, Palm CEO and former Apple Vice President of the iPod Division, said Apple would be silly to get into the mobile handset marketplace:

Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee? There is no such combined device, because it would not make anything better than an individual toaster or coffee machine. It works the same way with the iPod, the digital camera or mobile phone: it is important to have specialized devices.

We all know what’s happened since – Apple dominates the smartphone market while Palm struggles. But you gotta give them something, don’t you? So Palm, congratulations on finally crossing the thousand-app barrier. Give us a ring in 2024 when you pass the 25,000 app mark.

TUAWCongrats Palm: you’ve finally hit 1% of the App Store’s total. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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