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From Engadget: Apple offers refund over Australian 4G iPad confusion

Confused over Apple’s liberal use of the 4G moniker? The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reckons you have a point and took those concerns to Apple Australia. The company has now responded to the country’s federal court, offering to contact — by email — everyone who bought the retina-screened slab and promise a refund if they felt misled over its connectivity capabilities. Apple will also amend its point of sale details to explain that while it can connect to 4G (LTE) networks in the US and Canada, it won’t connect to Australia’s own next-generation network offered by Telstra. Apple also thinks that the existence of HPSA capability — and its nebulous definition as either a third-generation or fourth generation network — in the Land Down Under meant it could still hold onto those 4G credentials.

 

from Engadget

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From Engadget: MIT’s 3D solar cells take cubism to new energy efficient heights

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The promise of free energy is an enticing one — that’s free as in renewable source, not cost. (This is capitalism, after all, someone’s got to foot the bill.) Economic gripes aside, research outfits like M.I.T. are getting us one step closer to this cleaner fuel future with the creation of three dimensional photovoltaic cells. The team’s findings, recently published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, demonstrate how these computer-modeled structures, rising upward in an unfolded accordion shape, have been proven to increase their energy yield over contemporary flat panels by up to 20 times in field and theoretical testing. This capacity gain, made possible by an efficient harvesting of sunlightduring less optimal hours of the day, could be especially helpful in powering regions prone to overcast or wintry climates. The tech is still far from consumer friendly, though, with the actual price of the associated juice exceeding that of traditional solar tech. With continued improvements to the manufacturing process, however, residential and business customers could very well look forward to a future outfitted with solar towers only a Cubist could love.

Continue reading MIT’s 3D solar cells take cubism to new energy efficient heights

 

from Engadget

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From Ars Technica: Researcher publishes specs for real Linux-powered Star Trek tricorder


The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.

He began working on the project in 2007 and aims to make it easy for others to reproduce his designs. He has made complete schematics for two of his four models available under the terms of the TAPR non-commercial hardware license. The underlying source code of the device’s software environment is available under the GPL. In a blog post about the project, Jansen explained that he hopes his project will encourage scientific curiosity and help people better understand the world.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: Red Hat hits $1 billion in revenue, a milestone for open source


Red Hat today announced that it has crossed the billion-dollar mark in revenue, with $1.13 billion in the fiscal year that ended February 29.

Red Hat is unique in becoming the first vendor of its size to make all or nearly all of its money from building, maintaining, and selling open source software. We examined the company’s long journey in the recent article, “How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business.” Red Hat’s quarterly earnings announcement today shows that the company did cross a billion, as expected, with $297 million in fourth quarter revenue, up 21 percent over the previous year’s fourth quarter.

For the entire 12 months ending Feb. 29, Red Hat pulled in $965.6 million in subscription revenue, and $167.5 million in training and services, for a 25 percent year-over-year improvement. Net income was $35.97 million for the quarter and $146.6 million for the full 12 months. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin praised Red Hat in a blog post today, saying “This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that ‘nobody can make money with open source.'”

Red Hat is most famous for Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with its contributions to the Linux kernel, but the company builds and sells many enterprise software products in addition to its flagship distribution. As we noted in our previous story, the only Red Hat technology that hasn’t been completely released under open source licenses is the OpenShift platform-as-a-service software, which is based largely on the 2010 acquisition of Makara. Red Hat has good news on that front too—the source code for the core technology behind OpenShift will be released on April 30.

 

from Ars Technica

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From Autoblog: Opinion: How autonomous cars are about to change our future

autonomous car

The biggest hurdles to autonomous cars will be legal, not technical.

Most car enthusiasts hate the idea of cars that can drive themselves. But autonomous cars will get here faster than most people realize. Slowly but surely, automobiles are doing more of our driving for us. It’s only a matter of time before they take over completely.

Just look at how much control we’ve already ceded to the computers under the hood. Anti-lock brakes, which are consistently better at threshold braking than mere mortals, are pretty much standard equipment. So are traction control and stability control. We now have blind spot detection, lane departure warning, active lane control, and even self-parking.

Now comes the next step. Mercedes-Benz and Audi recently demonstrated Traffic Jam Assist, which uses adaptive cruise control and automatic steering to completely take control of a car up to 60 kilometers an hour (about 37 mph). Google has racked up tens of thousands of miles on its fleet of fully autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids on California roads. The technology will be showroom ready before the end of the decade.

The biggest hurdles will be legal, not technical. For example, who’s at fault when one of these cars gets in an accident? And how will the police pull over an autonomous car if they need to? But we’ll resolve those issues, and when we do, autonomous cars will have a bigger impact on society than when the first horseless carriages appeared over a century ago.

from Autoblog