Category: News

In a perfect world, humans would easily get all the nutrition we need from basic foods. But since the world is far from perfect, dietary supplementation is often necessary to overcome the nutritional shortfalls we face as a result of nutrient-depleted soils, environmental…

Doctors and medical professionals at the Veterans Affairs are handing out dangerous tranquilizers such as Xanax and Valium to military service members diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder though they have been repeatedly advised not to do so because of the potential…

Have a serious heart rhythm problem and trying alternative and complementary approaches to help? If so, the odds are you might well be told by your mainstream doctor and even family and friends that those therapies are “quackery” and you need to totally rely on Big Pharma…

It’s already bad. Very bad. For the past 25 years, the biotech Dr. Frankensteins have been inserting DNA into food crops. The widespread dangers of this technique have been exposed. People all over the world, including many scientists and farmers, are up in arms about…

The health effects of our friendly bacteria of our gastrointestinal tract are rarely fully understood by most in the medical field, and even less appreciated by the general public. The population’s minority of health conscious consumers do understand the intestinal…

The things you eat have a direct effect on your state of mind, and even have the power to drastically alter your behavioral patterns. These are the findings of a new study out of Oxford University in the U.K., which revealed that processed junk food consumption can lead…

Being diagnosed with cancer is perhaps the most emotionally traumatic thing that can happen to someone. What’s more, it is a diagnosis that leads to a feeling of desperation as patients search in vain for any and all available treatment options, with many, if not most…

A growing number of studies are implicating high dietary intake of meat and omega-6 fatty acids as a significant risk factor in the development of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, while also suggesting that higher vitamin…

Just move along, folks. There’s nothing to see here. That’s the attitude of the Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano when it comes to scrutiny of her agency’s massive purchase requests for billions – that’s right, billions – of rounds of ammunition…

Late last night, after sitting stunned before T-Mobile USA’s website, I hauled down to the local corporate store to confirm the new Simple Choice plan would really save so much in monthly fees. I was more surprised the shop wasn’t overrun by people rushing to take advantage of the new rates.

I still can’t believe them. Simple Choice? I am simply stunned. My last phone bill with AT&T, after tax and fees, was about $295 for Mobile Share plan with 10GB data. I tried to reduce to 4GB shared, but an AT&T rep said the bill would be the same ($270 before tax and fees). WTH? At T-Mobile I added three lines with unlimited talk, text and web for $120. I won’t move the other two lines until iPhone 5 comes to T-Mobile on April 12. That will add another $70 to the monthly fee, which should work out to about $90 less than AT&T soaks me for now, perhaps more.

T-Mobile introduced the new rate plans on Sunday but gave them the big kick-off today during the “Un-carrier” event also announcing iPhone’s imminent arrival. Under the new guise, subsidized phones are no more, while calling and data plans are surprisingly simplified and affordable. Under the scheme we’re all used to, AT&T sells you iPhone 5 for $199 but pays Apple $649. To the buyer, the real price is hidden — it’s a fiction. For his or her pretend price, AT&T demands 24-month contractual commitment. When the time period is over, monthly fees stay the same.

Simple Choice is different. There is no contract or subsidy. Consumers pay full price for the phone, which can be spread out, after $99.99 down payment, interest-free for 24 months. For iPhone 5 that’s $20 a month or $18 for BlackBerry Z10. When the subscriber finishes paying off the phone, the monthly fee goes down, simply to the regular service fees. For someone bringing his or her own unlocked devices, T-Mobile really heaps on the savings compared to rivals.

Simply Shocking

The pricing works like this: The first phone is $50 a month for unlimited text, talk and web. The first 500MB data is high-speed, and throttled thereafter. The second line is $30 and $10 for each after, up to five total. Upgrade to 2GB of data is another $10 per line a month and unlimited for 20 bucks.

My wife and I both have the Nexus 4 and mom Galaxy Nexus, which T-Mobile’s network better supports than AT&T. Costs for three phones, unlimited text, talk and web is $90 — $50 + $30 + $10. Mom doesn’t need more than 500MB per month. My wife wouldn’t likely ever exceed 2GB, and I opted for unlimited. That’s $10 + $20 for the initial data, which gets to the $120. Rather than the typical $35 activation fee, T-Mobile charged $10 per line.

When iPhone 5 is available next month, I’ll spend $199.98 ($99.99) for the handsets (one for my 91 year-old father-in-law and the other my college-age daughter). Financing will add $40 ($20 x 2) per month plus $10 service each per line and another $10 so my daughter has 2GB monthly data. Total then before tax and fees: $190. No activation fees and lower upfront cost for iPhone 5 (half other carriers) is icing on the cake.

Mobile Share

In fairness to AT&T, I tried several different plan changes to reduce my fees but couldn’t get anywhere close to T-Mobile and meet the family’s text, talk and data needs. The AT&T 550 family plan starts at $59.99 per month, with each additional line $9.99 but only up to three. I need five. The 700-minute plan is $69.99 per month and $9.99 per additional line. For five that works out to $109.95 before adding data. For 300MB data for two smartphones, monthly cost is $40 more ($20 x 2) and 3GB data $90 ($30 x 3). That’s $239.95 before tax and fees, without unlimited text message, which we would need.

AT&T’s Mobile Share 4GB plan starts at $70 per month and each smartphone is an additional $40. That’s where the rep got $270 — $70 + $200 ($40 x 5). AT&T tiers pricing that makes buying more data more attractive. The 10GB plan also is $270 — $120 base fee and $30 per phone ($150 for five).

No matter how I slice the numbers, AT&T costs considerably more per month. For my family. Your mileage may vary. If I bought five phones, my T-Mobile bill would be higher.

Some of my AT&T lines are still under contract and subject to early-termination fees, which are discounted based on the amount of time left on the 24 months. By selling the iPhones my daughter and father-in-law will surrender and comparing my current monthly fees versus the reduced ones, I should be ahead after two months, despite ETFs. Possibly three. AT&T prorating and paying a month ahead makes exact calculations tricky.

When the iPhones are paid off, assuming we don’t change any phones meanwhile (whom am I kidding), the bill would go down $40 per month, or to just $150.

Photo Credit: koya979/Shutterstock

Amazon Web Services runs on tons and tons of shared hardware. That’s a huge benefit in terms of cost but also spooks customers with strict regulatory requirements that prevent them from running their applications on shared infrastructure.

But now, as Amazon tries to woo these picky customers, it’s trying to replicate some of the perks that come with dedicated, on-premises hardware. That’s what the new CloudHSM service is about. Traditionally, a Hardware Security Module is a dedicated, hardened box for storing keys and running cryptography. Amazon says it can bring that dedicated security to its customers within its infrastructure.

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In a Tuesday night blog post, Amazon said CloudHSM:

“brings the benefits of HSMs to the cloud. You retain full control of the keys and the cryptographic operations performed by the HSM(s) you create, including exclusive, single-tenant access to each one. Your cryptographic keys are protected by a tamper-resistant HSM that is designed to meet a number of international and US Government standards including NIST FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria EAL4+.”

Each CloudHSM provisioned for the customer incurs an upfront, one-time $5,000 fee and then an hourly rate of $1.88 per hour or $1,373 per month. Pricing is  here.

Bringing on-prem perks to public infrastructure

Amazon has made progress in offering more enterprise-grade cloud capabilities with its GovCloud services and Virtual Private Cloud capabilities. But still, even some of the biggest AWS customers will only put parts of their workloads on the Amazon cloud. The mission-critical goodies stay on premises or on private clouds.

That’s why Amazon has to get more acclimated with private cloud capabilities — observers say one reason that AWS might be building a private cloud for the CIA, as has been reported, is to prove its credibility there.  And that’s why we’ll be seeing more services like this CloudHSM service.

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Final Book Now Available

The standard incandescent light bulb, which still works mainly as Thomas Edison invented it, converts more than 90% of the consumed electricity into heat. Given the availability of newer lighting technologies that convert a greater percentage of electricity into useful light, there is potential to decrease the amount of energy used for lighting in both commercial and residential applications. Although technologies such as compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have emerged in the past few decades and will help achieve the goal of increased energy efficiency, solid-state lighting (SSL) stands to play a large role in dramatically decreasing U.S. energy consumption for lighting. This report summarizes the current status of SSL technologies and products—light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic LEDs (OLEDs)—and evaluates barriers to their improved cost and performance.

Assessment of Advanced Solid State Lighting also discusses factors involved in achieving widespread deployment and consumer acceptance of SSL products. These factors include the perceived quality of light emitted by SSL devices, ease of use and the useful lifetime of these devices, issues of initial high cost, and possible benefits of reduced energy consumption.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Energy and Energy Conservation | Engineering and Technology

As we’ve seen multiple times from MobileMe to iOS Maps, online services are Apple’s (AAPL) most glaring weakness. And now it seems that we can add iCloud to the list of Apple’s online service follies, because many third-party developers are hopping mad at what they describe as Apple’s failure to make iCloud seamlessly integrate and sync up with third-party application data. In a lengthy and detailed piece over at The Verge, Ellis Hamburger talks with several disgruntled developers who say, among other things, that “iCloud hasn’t worked out for us,” that “it just doesn’t work,” that it creates “issues that take hours to resolve and… can permanently corrupt your account,” and that it’s “a developer’s worst nightmare… it’s frustrating, maddening, and costs hundreds of support hours.”

Continue reading…

If you were a fan of the original Fieldrunners game, we’ve some great news for you. Fieldrunners 2 is definitely happening, and it’s definitely happening soon. The game is already on iOS, but it’s slated for an Android release in April. It’s currently in beta to get the minor kinks worked out to prepare for a full release.

Like any sequel, Fieldrunners 2 will have more features, levels, weapons, the whole nine yards. The campaign will have 20+ hours of gameplay by itself, so that’s definitely a time waster worth looking forward to. The developer is looking for beta testers with many different Android devices, so if you’re interested in possibly getting your hands on the game a bit early, hit the press release below to see how to get a spot on the testing team.

FIELDRUNNERS 2 COMING TO ANDROID IN APRIL!

Get a taste of the much anticipated tower defense sequel by signing up for the closed beta

CAMBRIDGE, MA – March 26, 2013 – SUBATOMIC STUDIOS is excited to announce that their hit tower defense game, Fieldrunners 2, will be coming to Android in April! Fans have been clamoring for the game since it launched on iOS last July, so Subatomic Studios is pleased to say the development is almost complete. Do you want to help Subatomic Studios launch the tower defense classic ahead of schedule? Sign up for the closed beta below!

Beta Testers Wanted!

Subatomic Studios is looking for a handful of Android owners to help test Fieldrunners 2 on a variety of Android devices. If you are interested in helping out the developers, please click the link below to access the beta sign up form. Beta builds will be emailed out to testers several days after they have filled out the form below.

Sign up for the beta here: https://docs.google.com/a/subatomicstudios.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFROVC1ETG50V1ZIUnRqVVhHV2cxQ3c6MQ

Game Overview

Get ready to DEFEND THE WORLD! The biggest sequel in tower defense history is finally here: Fieldrunners 2 has arrived! From Subatomic Studios, creators of the award winning classic strategy game comes an all new adventure that was years in the making. Build epic mazes out of powerful weapons to defend the world from the invading fieldrunners!

Strategic-Action-Puzzle-Defense has never been this fun and addicting! Defend your world from the invasion by building winding paths out of imaginative, new weapons. Call in airstrikes and set explosive traps to hit the enemies where it hurts. Over 20 new levels span the grassiest fields, driest deserts, sparkling cities, and even an infernal volcano lair! Challenge your mind with the exciting new gameplay styles in Puzzle, Sudden Death, and Time Trial levels. Are you ready to stop the fieldrunners once and for all? Join the defense, now!

Key Features

• Pint sized invaders seeking revenge!

• A tower that launches bee hives!

• Tons of levels in a 20+ hour campaign!

• Revolutionary AI – each enemy creates a dynamic, realistic path through the battlefield!

• Gorgeous, hand painted, 2D graphics by award winning artists!

• 20 unique, upgradeable weapons!

• Custom load-outs let you pick the perfect weapons for each battle!

• Air strikes, mines and powerful items so you can strike with the precision of a surgeon!

• Time Trial, Sudden Death and Puzzle maps bring all new challenges to tower defense!

• Trenches, bridges and tunnels add new dimensions to gameplay!

• Collect all the Elite enemies to become the ultimate tower defense champion!

• A tower that turns enemies into barnyard animals!

About Subatomic Studios

Subatomic Studios, based in Cambridge, MA, is an award-winning independent developer of video games for handheld and mobile devices. Fieldrunners, the studio’s flagship game, combines gorgeous artwork with fine-tuned tower defense gameplay, allowing Subatomic Studios to captivate mobile gamers everywhere with a truly unique entertainment experience. Fieldrunners was first released for the iPhone and iPod Touch, followed by versions for the iPad, the PSP, the Nintendo DSi, BlackBerry, Android, Chrome Web Store, Roku, Gametree TV, and more! Fieldrunners 2, the studio’s second game, launched on July 19th for iPhone and iPod Touch, bringing revolutionary tower defense gameplay to a new generation! Fieldrunners 2 received an update that included in app purchases in October, followed by a free version in December, and a PC version in January.

Visit our home at www.subatomicstudios.com, join our Facebook Fan Page (http://www.facebook.com/Fieldrunners), and follow us on Twitter @Fieldrunners (http://twitter.com/#!/fieldrunners).

Come comment on this article: Fieldrunners 2 coming to Android in April

Gameloft has tried their hand at a few movie tie-in games before, including games for The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spiderman. The latest teasing tweet from the big gaming company shows something that may be Iron Man with the message “warming up main core” alongside the date March 27th, 2013. With Iron Man 3 right around the corner in theaters, it’s a pretty safe bet we’re going to see an Iron Man game from Gameloft on the 27th.

Anybody excited to see Tony Stark brought to life on a mobile game? We’ll be sure to keep you updated as soon as we learn more.

source: Gameloft

Come comment on this article: Gameloft teases possible Iron Man game for March 27th

With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!

Accessories

When To Expect Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 Accessories And For How Much

Apps & Games

Digg Outlines Focus on Creating an Improved Google Reader Replacement

New (believable) Google Babble mock-up shows up

The Humble Mobile Bundle Is Back: Choose Your Own Price For 6 Android Games

Samsung’s New S Voice Available To Download

Carriers

T-Mobile formally announces its 4G LTE network

Google

Google+ Now Allows Animated GIF Profile Photos

Google’s LTE-equipped Chromebook Pixel to start shipping April 8th

Phones

HTC Desire P and Desire Q Images and Specs Leak

HTC One to get software update in April to improve camera performance in lighted conditions

HTC Butterfly to get successor, could this be the DLXPLUS for Verizon?

HTC to get help from Qualcomm to market the HTC One

US HTC One hits “several hundred thousand” preorders

Samsung Galaxy S 4 wallpapers now available to download

Samsung Galaxy S 4 ringtones now available for download

Samsung Galaxy S 4 videos show Group Play, camera, motion functions, and video help

T-Mobile announces the launch details for the HTC One and Galaxy S 4 smartphones

Lockscreen security flaws seem to be contagious as Sony Xperia Z becomes next victim

Miscellaneous

Samsung sues LG for tarnishing brand image

Smart connected devices surpassed 1 billion units for 2012 worldwide, smartphones and tablets grew exponentially

 

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for March 26, 2013

Developers are always on the lookout for new, better, faster, cooler tools, languages, compilers. And the popularity  of these toolsets ebbs and flows. One week Scala is at the top, the next it’s Go language.

Last week it was Sawzall‘s time to shine. The language, named after the popular saw that cuts through anything (and I mean anything), comes out of Google.

Silvius Rus, director of big data platforms for Quantcast, gave Sawzall a shout-out during a Structure Data Guru panel last week. ”It’s a lightweight language developed by Google that ridges procedural and interpretive languages,” Rus said.

Michael Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets and moderator of the panel, later explained why that’s important. With a declarative language, the programmer tells the computer what to do in almost English-language-like sentences. To tell the computer to draw a circle, a declarative or imperative programmer might say “draw.circle with a size attached,” Driscoll said.

Procedural languages, on the other hand, are much more detailed step-by-step instructions — they sound more like math. A procedural approach would “define the actual pointer and tell it to move one degree to the left and one degree up and the square root of 2 up to the diagonal and repeat X times,” Driscoll said.

Sawzall is a nice blend between a declarative language that might be too high level to do all of what the programmer really wants and procedural, “which is way too in the weeds” to be fully productive, Driscoll said. More broadly, Sawzall is a powerful and compact language for log data aggregation and transformation. And, he added, it plays well with Hadoop MapReduce.

New toolsets for webscale computing

Another tool ranking high on the hit list was YARN (or Yet Another Resource Manager) aka MapReduce 2.0, cited by Todd Papaioannou, founder and CEO of Continuuity is a fan.

Yarn was built to “just think about mass-produced jobs.” Continuity is building a real-time streaming engine called Big Flow and using Yarn for all the resource deployment and management.

He also gave kudos to Weave, a higher-level framework. Weave “allows you to build a much wider class of applications on top of Yarn. So,t Yarn is  … something that we will be going forward with for at least the next half a decade [and] Weave allows you to actually build more wide scale applications on top of that.”

Bhaskar Ghosh,  senior director of engineering at LinkedIn, touted Helix, a generic distribution cluster manager developed at LinkedIn and which is now an Apache incubator project.  Helix simplifies distributed system development by separating cluster management from the primary component tasks of a distributed system, according to LinkedIn.

Kafka, Storm slake the thirst for real-time frameworks

Driscoll also sees traction for Kafka, a real-time framework for ingesting and managing data streams and Storm, out of Twitter, for processing those streams. “Think of Kafka and Storm as the HDFS and MapReduce analogs but for real time — Kafka for storage and Storm for compute,” Driscoll said.

On its blog, LinkedIn describes Kafka as a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system — also now an Apache project. Kafka is used by Twitter and Square for log aggregation, queeuing, and real-time monitoring and event processing.

This list is by no means complete. When I spoke with Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner a few weeks ago, he said Clojure, heretofore a rather obscure dynamic programming language, is gaining momentum. “It’s getting a lot of buzz round on the enterprise side,” Preston-Werner said.

The continued popularity of the Java Virtual Machine has breathed new life into languages like Clojure and Scala, he added. Indeed, the JVM remains nearly ubiquitous and that is a huge advantage for languages that support it. If you’re a developer, you want the widest possible audience.

“The JVM is still the modern foundation that lets you run everywhere and Clojure has benefited from that,” Driscoll agreed. “It’s certainly gained steam among an elite set of programmers in Silicon Valley.”

Sawzall photo courtesy of Flickr user Charles & Hudson

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• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

Samsung certainly seems to have sprung a leak with the new Galaxy S 4 device as we have seen the device’s wallpapers, ringtones and S Voice app all find their way out into the wild. The latest batch of goodies from the Galaxy S 4 are four videos that will come preloaded on the devices to help new owners get acquainted with some new features. Hit the break to see the videos.

The Camera

One of the “standard” apps that Samsung spent some time adding new functions to for their new device is the camera. Samsung added the ability to do a picture-in-picture type function that utilizes both the front- and rear-facing cameras at the same. This lets users embed images from both lenses into a single picture or use both cameras during video conferencing sessions. The camera is also able to embed audio data in a picture file.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Group Play

Extending the S Beam concept, for the Galaxy S 4 Samsung has added a function called Group Play. This lets users share multimedia files in real time rather than transferring them between devices and each person watching or listening on their own.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Motion Detection

One of the features that owners of Samsung Galaxy Note II devices get to enjoy is the ability to hover the S Pen over the screen to trigger pop-ups of information, previews of data, or to perform some actions. For the Galaxy S 4, Samsung is taking this to a new level. First, they have enabled this functionality just using a finger – no S Pen required. The ability to use the “Air” functions has expanded to some other apps like the phone, where gestures can be used to answer the phone.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video Help Demo

The final video is supposed to be from a Video Help Demo. It is not entirely clear what Samsung may eventually show with this particular video as it appears only a short portion is available. The portion that is available does continue the “Life Companion” message and branding that Samsung is implementing with this device.

Click here to view the embedded video.

source: SamMobile

Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy S 4 videos show Group Play, camera, motion functions, and video help

Despite rumors of hardware problems and delays for HTC’s One, it still looks like demand for the phone is insanely high. Early reports say the early responses to the phone are “fantastic” and preorders in the US have already hit “several hundred thousand.”

HTC is saying that demand for this phone is the greatest they’ve ever had for a phone, which is some positive news for a company that’s otherwise seen a rough, rough year. Hopefully these preorders get filled in the US pretty quickly, considering HTC said US phone supply shouldn’t be affected by their component restrictions.

source: Focus Taiwan

Come comment on this article: US HTC One hits “several hundred thousand” preorders