Author: Serkadis

(NaturalNews)It’s simple. Authorities invented the idea that other people have issues with authority. Psychiatrists rank right up there among the elitists setting the standards. They, for example, have concocted a little fictional doodad called Oppositional Defiance Disorder…

Some publishers and content companies are betting their future on subscription revenue from readers and users, while others are keeping their content free and banking on advertising revenue to pay the way. What are the pros and cons of each model?

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Americans continue to spend big on their internet needs, and that is reflected in the robust demand for broadband during the first three months of 2013. Data collected by Leichtman Research Group, a Durham, NH-based market research company, shows that the top broadband providers in the U.S. added 1.1 million (net) new connections over that period, bringing the total number of broadband subscribers to about 82.4 million.

According to their research, cable companies have about 47.5 million broadband subscribers, while the remainder are with the phone companies. Cable companies added about 800,000 new subscribers, about 72 percent of the total for the month. The top two phone companies — AT&T and Verizon — saw a decline of 696,000 DSL accounts but added a total of 919,000 fiber subscribers. FIber-based broadband now accounts for about 40 percent of AT&T and Verizon’s total broadband customer base.

Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, pointed out that typically the first quarter is better than the second and third quarters of the year, and “2013 began with another strong first quarter.” Net broadband additions in Q1 2013 were about 500,000 more than in Q4 2012, and that bodes well for rest of the year.

A resurgent housing market and stronger economy along with our growing need for speed and connectivity are the reasons why demand for U.S. broadband is booming. Here are some numbers to give you an idea as to who is winning and who is losing.

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NTIA’s Report on Broadband Availability is out. They have tracked availability from June 2010 to June 2012. Here’s the quick answer…

Broadband at the basic speed combination of 3/768 is available to 98.18% of the population, and 94.39% of Americans can subscribe to services of at least 10 Mbps

I’d like to remove that 3/768 track, but the NTIA explains why they track such slow speeds…

NTIA begins its analysis at the combined advertised connection of 3 Mbps downstream and 768 kbps upstream, which is the closest combination of speeds for which NTIA collects data that would allow a consumer to “access a basic set of applications that include sending and receiving e-mail, downloading Web pages, photos and video, and using simple video conferencing.”

I think it’s also important to know their definition of available; it’s a little non-standard…

For the purposes of NTIA’s data collection, broadband is “available” if it can be deployed to a business or consumer within 7-10 business days and without an extraordinary commitment of resources. This definition is in contrast to “adoption,” which means that a consumer or business subscribes to or uses broadband at a particular location. The definition of broadband does not specifically include price, latency, bandwidth limitations, or other factors that may impact a user’s ability to purchase or use the service.

What about Minnesota?

As always I’m most concerned with how Minnesota stacks up in the report. They include a list of the top 15 States with Most Broadband Access at 10, 25, and 50 Mbps. Minnesota does not make any of those lists. I guess on a silver lining note, we don’t make the worst list either. Minnesota also got no mention on a recent Akamai report that track speed and adoption.

About a week ago, Connect Minnesota gave a sneak preview on Minnesota’s broadband availability. (Connect Minnesota provides data to NTIA for their report.)

Last October, our data showed that there was 61.57% access across the state at the 10 Mbps by 6 Mbps tier (and 81.97% at the 10 Mbps x 3 Mbps tier, fixed platform; factoring in mobile broadband, we had 87.18% availability at this speed tier).

As of April 2013, we see an improvement of nearly eight percent: April 2013 data showed that 69.19% of Minnesota households have access to broadband at a minimum of 10 Mbps download by 6 Mbps upload (and 87.0% at the 10 Mbps x 3 Mbps tier, fixed platform; factoring in mobile broadband, we have 97.28% availability at this speed tier).

It’s great (really great!) to see a 8 percentage growth – and hopefully that will put us on track to make the Top 15 list in the future but it doesn’t help us rank today.

Outside of the Minnesota perspective, there were a few other points I found interesting…

• Almost 100% of urban residents have access to download speeds of at least 6 Mbps, but only 82% of rural communities can access these speeds. Almost 88% percent of urban residents have access to speeds of 25 Mbps. Only 41% of rural residents, less than half those in urban communities, have the same access. …
• approximately 5% of the population lives in areas with basic wireless broadband service, but no wireline broadband service. …
• The increase in wireline speeds is primarily a result of an increase in cable speeds, followed by a much smaller increase in fiber deployment.

Google gave a presentation about Google+ and Search at Google I/O last week. With Google’s “social layer” becoming a bigger part of search and the larger Google ecosystem, this is probably one marketers will want to check out.

“In this session we’ll walk you through a series of techniques you can use to make your app and content shine on Google,” Google says in session description. “Using these techniques you can connect more directly with new and existing users on Google Search.”

Jacqueline Walters Danforth, the daughter of television personality Barbara Walters, was arrested for DUI in Florida this past Sunday.

According to the Collier County Sheriff’s records, this was her first offense. It was officially listed as “TRAFFIC OFFENSE-DUI ALCOHOL OR DRUGS 1ST OFF”.

TMZ, who obtained the police report, says it describes the incident as follows: Danforth was in the driver’s seat of a Honda Pilot, which police stopped at 1:24 AM after reports about an SUV stopped on the highway without its lights. She and a male passenger were found to appear “extremely intoxicated,” and when they went to place the male in handcuffs, she grabbed at one of them and “began shouting.”

An arresting officer reportedly said in the report, “I was afraid that the suspect may run into traffic on the highway, so she was taken to the ground due to her unpredictable behavior, then secured in handcuffs.”

Danforth was released several hours after being booked, on $1,000 bond. Her court date is scheduled for June 12th.

Danforth is 44 years old.

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Empty folders are bound to appear on the computer at one point or another, especially when you create a temporary space to hold your work. Getting rid of these items for better managing said space can be pretty tedious when done manually.

But there are easier solutions, such as Sub4Del, which can complete eliminate the empty spaces in a couple of clicks, literally.read more)

Power infrastructure in a data center (Photo by Tim Dorr via Flickr)

Last week the New York Times suggested that the data center industry has become a “wildcat power utility” by reselling power to customers at a profit and ripe for regulation. So we reached out to experts who were familiar with both data centers and utilities and asked: Is the data center industry a candidate for regulation as a utility?

Their answer: Although power is a key component of their offerings, data centers differ from utilities in very significant ways. Another key point is that data center clients are typically sophisticated companies that are paying premium prices, and unlikely candidates for exploitation by service providers – a key historical concern of utility regulation.

But these experts also noted that some industry practices open the door to greater scrutiny, and data center operators need to be more transparent about their practices to address concerns.

Times: Power A Central Component of Leases

In its story last week, The New York Times took a critical look at power provisioning in data centers. “Electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary,” the Times wrote. “A result, an examination shows, is that the industry has evolved from a purveyor of space to an energy broker — making tremendous profits by reselling access to electrical power, and in some cases raising questions of whether the industry has become a kind of wildcat power utility.”

The paper added that “the capacity pricing by data centers …. appears not to have registered with utility regulators.”

Regulating data centers as utilities “doesn’t seem plausible to me,” said Coy Stine, Director of Data Center Services at Bluestone Energy, which works with utilities on energy efficiency incentives. “Data centers provide the service of a highly conditioned and very reliable power source. Customers can’t get that by plugging their services into the utility power plug in the wall. Comparing a data center to a utility is similar to saying a car manufacturer is a provider of sheet metal. The automobile has metal as a component, but there’s much more to it. The data center provider is playinhg the same role.”

“I think data centers are a whole different animal,” said Jon Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University who has done several landmark studies on data center energy use. “It’s not only the cost of a kilowatt of power. They’re charging for equipment and infrastructure like backup generators. These data centers aren’t like individual households. The key difference is that these (customers) are people who know what they’re doing.”

Sophisticated Customers

Both Koomey and Stine said they have heard of concerns being raised about the role of data centers in energy purchasing. But they say that equating data center providers to residential or office landlords is a flawed comparison, as they offer different services and have different types of customers.

“I think it stems from the old model of tenants being exploited by their landlords,” said Koomey. “The people that are renting data center space are typically pretty sophisticated folks who are paying a lot of money for these services. This idea that they’re taking advantage of these clients doesn’t make sense.”

“Data center customers have teams of people to negotiate their SLAs (service level agreements) very carefully,” said Stine. “The cost for the data center operator to buy switchgear and UPS gear and generators is factored into the cost to the customer. I think the customers understand this, but the general public does not. Most of the audience of the New York Times doesn’t understand what happens in the data center.”

The estimated death toll for the giant tornado that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma on Monday was drastically lowered today. While earlier reports had at least 51 people dead, including 20 children, the numbers have been revised to 24 confirmed dead, including 9 children.

State officials announced this morning that fewer people had been killed than previously thought, with a spokesperson for the state medical examiner’s office saying in a news conference that some of the victims had been counted twice. While certainly no death toll could be considered a good thing, a reduced number of deaths is a bright spot in an otherwise ghastly ordeal.

Emergency personnel continue to search for victims, including two dozen missing children from an elementary school that was destroyed.

Google has launched a crisis map, providing resources for those affected by the storm.

Photos and videos of the tornado and its destruction have flooded social media, giving the whole world a glimpse of the terror that ripped through the area. Here, you can see a video of the storm forming in Newcastle, OK. In this one, a woman finds her missing dog in the rubble while being interviewed by CBS.

Image via reddit

A lithium ion battery that can power a smart phone or tablet for up to 25 percent longer between charges than current alternatives is now out in the marketplace, from a venture capital-backed battery startup that has been very quiet for several years. The company, Amprius, is backed by a group of investors including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others.

We included Amprius, which was launched in 2008 as a spin out from Stanford University, on our list of 13 battery startups to watch in 2013. The startup has developed a battery based on research from Stanford’s Yi Cui, and its lithium ion batteries, announced Tuesday, use a nano-structured silicon material for the anode part of the battery.

A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Amprius’ nanostructured material allows the anode to be shrunk fourfold, delivering a fourfold increase in energy density.

Battery energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery per given volume. Amprius said its initial batteries can deliver 580 and 600 watt hours per liter, and its next-gen batteries can deliver 650 and 700 watt hours per liter. Traditional lithium ion batteries are operating at closer to 400 watt hours per liter.

Another one of the challenges that Amprius said it has overcome when building this battery is that it has had to engineer the silicon to make it stable enough to be charged and discharged repeatedly over time. The more stable the silicon, the longer the life time of the battery. Amprius said the anode can be charged and discharged more than 500 times while retaining 80 percent of the original capacity (a requirement for original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs).

Amprius is supplying its batteries to unnamed smartphone and tablet OEMs and is also working with OEMs to design its batteries in custom ways to fit into new consumer electronics, it said. The next-gen batteries are supposed to go into pilot production later this year.

Amprius has raised at least $25 million from investors including the ones listed above as well as IPV Capital, and Trident Capital. The company has an R&D lab in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an R&D lab and pilot production line in Nanjing, China.

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