Thursday, February 24, 2011
CBS, Warner pull plu
CBS, Warner pull plug on season of 'Two and a Half Men' | The Clarion-Ledger | clarionledger.com
LOS ANGELES — CBS and Warner Bros. Television say they are ending production on this season of "Two and a Half Men" in the wake of incendiary remarks by star Charlie Sheen.
In a statement Thursday, the network and studio said they were basing their decision on the "totality of Charlie Sheen's statements, conduct and condition."
Android 3.0 Honeycom
Android 3.0 Honeycomb First Impressions -- InformationWeek
After using Android 2.2 Froyo on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the newest version of the operating system -- Android 3.0 Honeycomb -- on the Motorola Xoom is a bit of an eye opener. Where Froyo on the Tab felt like a glorified phone, Honeycomb on the Xoom feels like a more complete OS for a tablet.
Honeycomb offers five customizable home screens that can be accessed by swiping to the left or right. Out of the box, a few of these home panels were littered with app shortcuts and widgets, but they can all be moved around or deleted. The design of these home pages is far more "tablet-like" than what was available on the Galaxy Tab. The larger display and extra real estate also help to legitimize the feel of Honeycomb as a separate OS from the smartphone version of Android.
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The central home screen offers a number of new control elements. You can more or less toss any ideas you have about Android 2.3 or 2.3 out the window when it comes to the basics. The drop-down notification shade has been killed off, the phone controls are gone, and everything has been moved to the bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
The bottom action bar holds most of the controls, and persists even when you have apps open and running. On the left side, three software buttons let users go back one screen, access the home screen, or open the new multitasking bar. The multitasking bar pops up on the left side of the screen and shows the last five apps a user has accessed. Jumping back to one is as simple as pressing it.
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The right side of the action bar is where the clock and other notifications have landed. App alerts, new message alerts, and all the settings are accessed here. It's not exactly user friendly, and takes some hit-and-miss style navigation to figure out exactly how to operate this revised set of settings tools.
In the upper right corner of the display, there is a drop-down tool that lets you access some options for whatever app or activity is on the display. This sort of replaces the menu function that's available to Android smartphones, but it isn't as extensive (or as useful). There is also a software button here to access all the apps on the device. Apps are placed into one master set of apps where all of them are stored, and a user-defined set of favorites. Personally, I don't see the point in offering this set of favorites, as you have to open the main app menu first, and then swipe over to see your favorites. Chances are the app you want is on that first app screen.
In terms of using the OS to move around and perform tasks, it is reasonably good. I noticed a lot of jitters, app crashes, and herky-jerky movement of the software. It feels as though it hasn't been optimized quite yet. The Android Market was on board, but there are barely any apps present that work with Honeycomb, and it was rather crashtastic.
The browser offers some nice amenities that the iPad's Safari browser doesn't (real tabs, for instance), but it was frustrating for several reasons. First, Web developers haven't had time to figure out how to handle incoming requests from Honeycomb. The result is that most Web pages rendered in Honeycomb are the mobile-optimized versions of those apps rather than the desktop versions. That really takes away from the Web browsing experience. (The iPad, in comparison, gets this right.) The browser also lacks Flash, so embedded video content doesn't play.
My favorite feature so far are the improved widgets. The Gmail widget, for example, lets you swipe up and down through your in-box to see unread messages. Too bad you can't actually read them from the widget. Pressing on an unread email in the widget opens the full email application (which in and of itself is a decent mishmash of the HTML5 version of Gmail that Google offers to WebKit browsers and what Apple has done with its email app on the iPad). The larger screen available on the tablet form factor means developers can go wild with their widgets. Right now, there aren't enough available to really get excited about.
After playing with Honeycomb for a few days, my overall first impression is that it is in a 0.9 beta state. It's not 100% baked, but it is close. I fully expect Google will offer updates (hopefully in the near future) that solve many of the issues I noticed as user feedback begins to pour in.
Stay tuned for InformationWeek's full review of the Motorola Xoom in the days ahead.
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South Korea Seeks In
South Korea Seeks Internet Speed of 1 Gigabit a Second
By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States.
A pilot gigabit project initiated by the government is under way, with 1,500 households in five South Korean cities wired. Each customer pays about 30,000 won a month, or less than $27.
“South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,” President Obama said in his State of the Union address last month. Last week, Mr. Obama unveiled an $18.7 billion broadband spending program.
While Americans are clip-clopping along, trailing the Latvians and the Romanians in terms of Internet speed, the South Koreans are at a full gallop. Their average Internet connections are far faster than even No. 2 Hong Kong and No. 3 Japan, according to the Internet analyst Akamai Technologies.
Overseeing South Korea’s audacious expansion plan is Choi Gwang-gi, 28, a soft-spoken engineer. He hardly looks the part of a visionary or a revolutionary as he pads around his government-gray office in vinyl slippers.
But Mr. Choi has glimpsed the future — the way the Internet needs to behave for the next decade or so — and he is trying to help Korea get there. During an interview at his busy office in central Seoul, Mr. Choi sketched out — in pencil — a tidy little schematic of the government’s ambitious project.
“A lot of Koreans are early adopters,” Mr. Choi said, “and we thought we needed to be prepared for things like 3-D TV, Internet protocol TV, high-definition multimedia, gaming and videoconferencing, ultra-high-definition TV, cloud computing.”
Never mind that some of these devices and applications are still under development by engineers in Seoul, Tokyo and San Jose, Calif. For Mr. Choi, nothing seems outlandish, unthinkable or improbable anymore. And the government here intends to be ready with plenty of network speed when all the new ideas, games and gizmos come pouring out of the pipeline.
“The gigabit Internet is essential for the future, absolutely essential, and all the technologists will tell you this,” said Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a leading technology consultancy in Fremont, Calif. “We’re all going to be doing cloud computing, for example, and that won’t work if you’re not always connected. Games. Videoconferencing. Video on demand. All this will require huge bandwidth, huge speed.”
The South Korean project is also meant to increase wireless broadband services tenfold.
Even as South Korea aims for greater, faster connectivity, Internet addiction is already a worrisome social issue here. Deprogramming camps have sprung up to help Net-addicted youngsters.
One South Korean couple, arrested last year, became so immersed in a role-playing game at an Internet cafe that their 3-month-old daughter starved to death — even as they fed and nurtured a virtual, online daughter named Anima.
But industry executives are plowing ahead.
“The name of the game is how fast you can get the content,” said Kiyung Nam, a spokesman for the Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung Electronics. “People want to download and enjoy their content on the go. But right now it’s not seamless. It’s not perfect.”
The idea of the gigabit Internet is not a new one, said Mr. Norman, the American consultant. But large-scale adoptions have not yet taken hold, especially outside Asia.
Hong Kong and Japan offer gigabit service. Australia has a plan in the works for 2018. Google is drafting pilot programs for part of the Stanford campus and other locales in the United States. And Chattanooga, Tenn., has started a citywide gigabit service, reportedly at a staggering $350 a month.
Any technical hurdles in upgrading the existing South Korean infrastructure are minimal, according to engineers and network managers. DSL lines — high-speed conventional telephone wires — will have to be replaced. But fiber-optic lines already widely in use are suitable for one-gigabit speeds.
South Korea, once poorer than Communist North Korea, now has the world’s 13th-largest economy. It recovered from the ravages of the Korean War by yoking its economy to heavy industries like cars, steel, shipbuilding and construction. But when labor costs began to rise, competing globally in those sectors got tougher, so “knowledge-based industries were the way forward,” Mr. Choi said.
South Koreans pay an average of $38 a month for connections of 100 megabits a second, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Americans pay an average of $46 for service that is molasses by comparison.
Mr. Choi declined to guess what private South Korean service providers might charge for the one-gigabit service. But he said it would be nowhere near the $70 a month charged for gigabit rates in Japan.
“I can’t imagine anyone in Korea paying that much,” he said. “No, no, that’s unthinkable.”
Mr. Choi’s gigabit program is just one of several Internet-related projects being coordinated by the government here over the next four years. Their overall cost is projected to be $24.6 billion, with the government expected to put up about $1 billion of that amount, according to the Korea Communications Commission.
Private South Korean firms, notably KT (the former Korea Telecom), SK Telecom and the cable provider CJ Hellovision, are the principal participants in the gigabit project. The government’s financial contribution in 2010, Mr. Choi said, would be just $4.5 million.
For now, most Korean consumers use their blessings of bandwidth largely for lightning Internet access and entertainment — multiplayer gaming, streaming Internet TV, fast video downloads and the like. Corporations are doing more high-definition videoconferencing, especially simultaneous sessions with multiple overseas clients, and technologists are eager to see what new businesses will be created or how existing businesses will be enhanced through the new gigabit capability.
One of the customers already connected to Mr. Choi’s pilot program is Moon Ki-soo, 42, an Internet consultant. He got a gigabit hookup about a year ago through CJ Hellovision, although because of the internal wiring of his apartment building his actual connection speed clocks in at 278 megabits a second.
But even that speed — about a quarter-gigabit — has him dazzled.
“It is so much more convenient to watch movies and drama shows now,” he said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 24, 2011
An article on Tuesday about superfast Internet services in South Korea misstated the number of households involved in a pilot project. Under the program, which aims to connect customers to the Internet at speeds of up to one gigabit per second, 1,500 homes in five South Korean cities have so far been connected, not 5,000 homes.