LA’s newer cell towers will keep working after earthquakes
Cellular networks are only trustworthy if they continue running in emergencies, and Los Angeles knows it. The city’s council has voted for legislation that requires all new cell towers to be tough enough to remain functional after a major earthquake — not just standing, like they need to do today. Officials believe that this will involve only a “marginal” hike in costs, but should make a huge difference the next time a big quake rocks LA and leaves residents scrambling for help. This hardening process won’t be truly comprehensive until carriers start replacing existing towers, which could take years. However, patience could be a virtue if it keeps families and rescue teams in touch when a disaster strikes.
[Image credit: Getty Images]
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile
Via: RCRWireless
Source: NBC Los Angeles
AT&T GoPhone prepaid plans add rollover data
When it comes to saving money and getting a deal on cellular service, prepaid plans tend to be the best choice, especially if you get service via MVNOs, which tend to have more aggressive pricing than traditional carriers. That said, recently even the big US carriers have been doing more to make their prepaid plans stand out and for AT&T GoPhone that means adding rollover data to select prepaid plans.
Starting May 15th AT&T will allow any unused data from one month carry over to the next, though this carried balance only lasts 30 days and so you can’t keep hording data over a larger period of time. Furthermore, the data rollover option will only apply to the $45 (1.5GB data) and $60 prepaid (4GB) plans. In addition to rolling over high-speed data, AT&T also offers unlimited reduced speeds once you run out of your allotment, though the speeds are as low as 128kbps.
Even with the addition of rollover data, it is pretty hard to recommend AT&T GoPhone’s service when there are plenty of other options out there that offer more. Then again, some folks prefer dealing with bigger carries (which generally have better customer service) than smaller MVNOs, so there’s always that. What do you think of AT&T’s GoPhone service, especially with the latest additional perk? Let us know in the comments.
Humble Mobile Bundle 12 grows to eight games
The latest Humble Mobile Bundle, which benefits some great causes, has eight games up for grabs. A donation of any amount will reward donors with three titles and donations exceeding the average amount raises that number by five.
Any donation:
- The Last Express
- Spaceteam (premium)
- Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous
Average donation or more:
- Monument Valley
- Blek
- Joe Danger
- Groundskeeper2
- Highrise Word Heroes (premium)
These games, when purchased individually through Google Play, cost more than $20 altogether. So there is plenty of money to be saved while also benefiting charities and developers. The charities participating in Humble Mobile Bundle 12 are Worldreader and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Worldreader aims to put digital books in the hands of children and their families while the Electronic Frontier Foundation fights for digital rights. Donors can choose how much money is split between the charities and developers as well as leave a tip for the people that run the Humble Bundle campaigns.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Source: Humble Bundle
Come comment on this article: Humble Mobile Bundle 12 grows to eight games
Warner Music Earned More Revenue From Streaming Services Than Downloads in Q2 2015
Apple’s upcoming revamped music service may be coming at the perfect time, right as revenue from streaming music is beginning to surpass revenue from digital downloads.
Streaming music services have been growing in popularity over the last several years, and in an earnings call today (via Re/code), Warner Music Group CEO Stephen Cooper told investors that for the first time, the company earned more revenue from streaming music services than from digital downloads.
Warner Music Group saw a 33 percent increase in its revenue from streaming music services from companies like Spotify and YouTube during the second quarter of 2015, while revenue from digital downloads like those from iTunes grew only seven percent. During the call, Cooper said that the growth of streaming music makes it “abundantly clear” that in the future, “streaming will be the way that most people enjoy music.”
“We experienced significant revenue growth this quarter across key segments of our business — in particular Recorded Music, across the U.S. and international and across digital and physical — capping off a strong first half of our fiscal year” said Stephen Cooper, Warner Music Group’s CEO. “Notably, in this quarter we saw continued growth in streaming revenue which surpassed download revenue for the first time in the history of our recorded music business. Our commitment to being at the forefront of industry change as well as our ongoing investment in artist development is the foundation of our continued success.”
Warner Music Group says that it expects streaming growth will continue, and it believes that declines in download revenue will be “a continuing trend.” Apple too has seen a stark decline in digital revenue in recent years, with sales dropping 5.7 percent in 2013 and further declining 13 percent worldwide in 2014.
A decline in iTunes music sales may have been one of the major factors that spurred Apple to purchase Beats Music, giving it a foothold in the streaming music market that it was late to enter. Apple has seen some criticism for its failure to embrace streaming music early on and the somewhat lukewarm reception of iTunes Radio.
Beats Music has failed to draw a significant number of customers away from Spotify, which has 60 million subscribers, of which 15 million pay for the premium service, but with more than 800 million credit cards on file, Apple’s upcoming revamped streaming music service has the potential to overtake competing services.
Rumors have suggested that the new service will be similar to the existing Beats Music service, but with a focus on exclusive content and deep integration into iTunes and Apple’s iOS Music app. It will be priced at $9.99 and no freemium tier will be offered, but Apple is looking at ways to offer music for free, through lengthy trial periods, iTunes Radio, and possibly a SoundCloud-like music sharing platform.
Apple is said to be planning to unveil its new music service in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
First Apple Watches With Link Bracelets Begin Shipping to Customers
Though the Apple Watch officially launched on April 24, several of the stainless steel Apple Watch configurations have been unavailable to ship for weeks due to supply shortages. Customers who ordered Apple Watches with Link Bracelets, Modern Buckles, and Leather Loops right after pre-orders began are still without their devices.
As of today, the first orders of these rarer watches appear to be shipping out. Several customers on the MacRumors forums who ordered the Apple Watch with Stainless Steel Link Bracelets are seeing their credit cards charged and have begun receiving shipping information from Apple. The first orders should be arriving to customers tomorrow.
There are many customers who are still waiting for their Link Bracelet Apple Watch orders to ship, but it appears the wait may not be much longer now that the first shipments are going out. Customers who ordered the Space Black Apple Watch with Link Bracelet have unfortunately not yet seen order movement, and it also looks like Modern Buckle and Leather Loop purchases are not yet shipping out.
When Apple started accepting pre-orders on April 10, Apple Watch orders with Link Bracelets in Stainless Steel saw shipping estimates ranging from four to six weeks, while the Link Bracelet in Space Black had June shipping estimates. Apple Watches with Modern Buckle and Leather Loop bands also had four to six week shipping estimates right when pre-orders began, suggesting those models may ship out soon.
Standalone Link Bracelet and Leather Loop bands ordered separately have already begun shipping out to customers. The Modern Buckle band remains unavailable for purchase.
It is not clear why the Link Bracelet, Leather Loop, and Modern Buckle have been in significantly shorter supply than the Classic Buckle, Milanese Loop, and Sport Band, but manufacturing processes may be a factor. According to Apple’s site, the Link Bracelet is crafted from 100 components, including links that take more than nine hours to cut, while the Modern Buckle and Leather Loop are made from leather sourced from small tanneries in France and Italy.
(Thanks, Warren!)
Seven Sega Saturn oddities you never played
It was 20 years ago today that Sega released the Sega Saturn, the US video game industry’s first and only surprise console release. Tom Kalinske, Sega of America’s CEO at the time, walked out onstage at E3 and announced to a theater full of game publishers, journalists and store owners that its new console was available right now for a whopping $400. If that seems like an insane business plan, it was; Saturn was so rushed to market that its scant few games didn’t even have titles printed on their case’s spines. Expensive and difficult to developer for, it was quickly buried by the popularity of Sony’s PlayStation. The sad truth is that while the Saturn wasn’t a hit here in the US, it actually enjoyed a healthy following in Japan thanks to an abundance of excellent games that only made it out in that region. Here are seven curios for Sega’s maligned machine that make it a must for fans of the obscure.
Elevator Action Returns – Taito (1997)
Elevator Action Returns encapsulates what the Sega Saturn did best in Japan: bringing weird-as-hell. arcade-style 2D action into the home. A sequel to Taito’s ’80s B-list arcade game, Elevator Action Returns turned the series into a zany cross between Starsky & Hutch and G.I. Joe. You pick one of three hair metal-ready heroes with guns to run through colorful stages full of elevators and strange terrorists.
Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari – Enix (1997)
Nanatsu Kaze no Shima Monogatari was born of Enix’s tradition for publishing deeply odd games that bucked genre conventions. Mixing the puzzle-solving adventure motifs of ’80s PC games like King’s Quest with the side-scrolling exploration of console games like Castlevania, Monogatari was like nothing else on any machine at the time. You play as a pudgy, bipedal dragon exploring a series of islands full of freaky old monsters and magic seeds. Monogatari is unusually peaceful and relaxed, a world of beautiful sights largely free of violence typical in other adventures.
Keio Flying Squadron 2 – Victor Entertainment (1996)
Games where you run from left to right, bopping on enemies, have been ubiquitous since Mario rescued Princess Peach, but there was a brief moment in the ’90s when they fell out of vogue in favor of 3D games. The Sega Saturn hosted a few truly bizarre side-scrollers like Keio Flying Squadron 2 during that drought. It is the only game to let you run around as an off-brand Playboy bunny collecting gold, hitting monsters with a giant hammer and hanging out with an adorable dragon.
Final Fight Revenge – Capcom (2000)
One of the very last games released for Sega Saturn, Final Fight Revenge is a heartbreaker. The much-loved brawling arcade series hadn’t had a proper entry since Final Fight 3 on Super Nintendo, but when it finally showed up on Saturn it was as a one-on-one fighting game. It also happened to be terrible. Final Fight Revenge‘s awfulness isn’t without its pleasures, though. The ridiculous polygonal models of awesome characters like wrestling mayor Mike Haggar and Poison, one of gaming’s first (purportedly) trans characters, make the game a lovable failure.
Dungeons & Dragons Collection – Capcom (1999)
For years, this anthology was the only way to play Capcom’s lushly animated arcade games based on the famous role-playing game series. While painstakingly accurate ports of those originals were finally brought to PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Wii U in 2013, the Sega Saturn collection remains impressive for how it translates those arcade games to a markedly less powerful machine. Plus: Playing them with the Saturn controller feels oh so right.
Princess Crown – Atlus (1997)
Vanillaware is the studio responsible for some of the most gorgeous, hand-drawn games made in the past 10 years including Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown. Princess Crown on Sega Saturn is the game that launched the studio, though: a gorgeous role-playing game with enormous, vivid sprite characters conceived by George Kamitani. Many of the ideas in those more recent games — including an obsession with building character stats with food — were born in this lovely game.
Bubble Symphony – Taito (1997)
Congratulations: You are now singing the Bubble Bobble theme song in your head. Made famous by the hallucinatory NES game about bubble-spitting dinosaurs destroying 99 stages of bulbous, tiny wizards and flying, purple whales, the Bubble Bobble series never got the sequel it deserved in the US. (The extremely rare Bubble Bobble 2 on NES and Rainbow Islands don’t count.) In Japan, there was Bubble Symphony. A prettier spin on the original’s action, Symphony is even more aggressively strange. How strange? The final boss is named Hyper Drunk. Seriously.
Researchers show you can be uniquely identified by your bacteria
The bacteria on and inside of your body, also known as your microbiome, could be another sort of fingerprint to identify you, according to new research out of Harvard. Researchers found that your bacterial buddies have enough unique features to be traced right back to you — at least, when compared to hundreds of other people. Using data from the Human Microbiome Project, they applied an algorithm that identified the distinguishing features of microbiomes, and they were subsequently able to identify who they came from based on followup visits. The bacterial fingerprints were stable in people for over a year, and testing of gut microbiomes managed to accurately identify people 80 percent of the time. There’s still plenty of testing to be done, naturally, but the findings show that researchers might want to be extra careful when dealing with microbiome data moving forward. Otherwise someone participating in a gut bacteria test could, for example, be outed as having a particularly embarrassing STD.
[Photo source: Getty]
Filed under: Science
Via: Phys.org
Source: PNAS
The first solar bike path is producing more energy than expected
Back in November, SolaRoad launched a test bike path that generates energy through solar cells embedded in the concrete. It sounds like an outlandish idea, but it’s apparently paying off very quickly. The company has revealed that its road has generated much more energy than expected — it produced 3,000kWh of electricity in the space of just six months, or enough to power a single person’s home for a year. That doesn’t sound like much, but SolaRoad notes that its path only covers a 230-foot stretch in a Dutch village. You’d get a lot more energy from longer, wider roads.
Things haven’t been going perfectly. The coating on the solar cells’ protective glass tends to peel off when the weather changes, for example, suggesting that the path could be expensive to maintain as-is. However, the project is going to last for another two and a half years. SolaRoad believes that it’ll have plenty of time to iron out the kinks, and it’s confident enough that it plans to test its technology on small municipal roads in the future. Between this and Solar Roadways in the US, you may soon find cycling routes that are as much about saving the environment as getting you from A to B.
Filed under: Transportation
Via: CBC, ThinkProgress
Source: SolaRoad
Want to Help Google Improve Chrome? There’s an Extension for That
Ever ready to listen to user feedback and then ponder whether or not to include said feedback in subsequent product releases, Google announced today a new Chrome User Experience Surveys extension that collects user experience data on Chrome. So it’s not just a clever name.
The tiny extension will pop up sometimes at random, or more often, when something unusual happens to Chrome, like bugs or malware warnings. Google says a user will get a maximum of two notifications per day, capped at four per week, with the average user seeing a survey once a month. Surveys are roughly 2-3 minutes in length.
Keenly aware of user trepidation when it comes to data harvesting, the third question answered in Google’s announcement of the extension (after “What?” and “Where?”) pertains to the information Google will collect from the extension. The answer: nothing personal. The only data collected will be that directly related to the extension.
Unlike Google’s awesome, if totally data-collection-obvious, Google Opinion Rewards app, which pays users a few dozen cents here and there for answering surveys, Chrome User Experience Surveys offer no remunerative benefits other than the satisfaction that comes from making everyone’s browsing experience just that much better.
Now aside from the fact that apparently Google requires an extension to fully ascertain the incredible resource drain that is Chrome on a Mac, this could be a useful and simple way for everyday users to help Google improve the world’s overwhelmingly dominant browser. (As an aside, remember when Chrome felt like this light little rebel browser up against the IE monolith?)
The feedback period only lasts 120 days, and Google dissuades you from uninstalling the extension before then. After 120 days, the extension will uninstall itself. Skynet once promised the same thing.
Source: Google
Come comment on this article: Want to Help Google Improve Chrome? There’s an Extension for That
Deal: Last chance to save 84% on a ibVPN Total Plan subscription
Having access to a VPN service is extremely important in today’s age. If you’ve ever used public Wifi, gotten your bandwidth throttled or needed to work remotely, a VPN service might be for you. The ibVPN Total Plan, which is currently 84% off in the AA Deals Store, will give you online privacy, unrestricted web browsing, faster streaming and more. But you better hurry… this deal is only available until Monday night!
Compatible with your smartphone and tablet, ibVPN will safeguard your internet privacy, bypass geo-restrictions, and keep your connection speed fast no matter what you’re streaming. Not only that, you’ll be able to choose between more than 75 VPN servers in 39 countries, take advantage of the 256-bit encrypted P2P file sharing and torrent download, and access blocked social media websites from anywhere. It’s also compatible with your Mac, Windows, Android or iOS devices.
Right now the ibVPN Total Plan, which gets you a 4-year subscription to the service, is just $59 in the Android Authority Deals Store. It can sometimes be tough to find a good deal on a quality VPN subscription, so you might want to check this one out. If you’re interested, head to the link below before this deal is over.
AIVAnet 