Report: iPhone unavailable to New Yorkers via AT&T’s Website

by Philip Michaels , Macworld.com
Ah, New York… the city that never sleeps. The town so nice they named it twice. The metropolitan area where, according to a report on Consumerist, you can’t buy an iPhone from AT&T.

OK, so that last one doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s apparently the case. Consumerist reported over the weekend that AT&T has quietly stopped selling the iPhone to customers in the New York area via its Website. Specifically, Consumerist found that while the phone was available to AT&T customers in San Francisco and other major cities, customers in New York City and suburban zip codes in New York’s Westchester County and Northern New Jersey were told by AT&T’s Website that the iPhone was not available in their area. Consumerist subsequently checked with a customer service rep via an online chat and was told that “the phone is not offered… because New York is not ready for the iPhone. You don’t have enough towers to handle the phone.”

We did some checking of our own and confirmed Consumerist’s original report. You can’t buy the iPhone from AT&T’s Website if you use a New York City zip code, as the screenshot below indicates. We also put in a call to AT&T to find out why the company was no longer offering the iPhone in the Big Apple.

“We periodicially modify our promotions and distribution channels,” Mark Siegel, AT&T Mobility’s executive director of media relations, told us.

To be clear, Manhattanites have other avenues for getting their hands on an iPhone if they so desire. Both the Soho and Fifth Avenue Apple Stores reported that the iPhone 3G and 3GS models were in stock when I called them Monday morning. Still, it’s a bit curious that Apple’s exclusive U.S. carrier would put the brakes on selling iPhones, especially around the tail end of the holiday season.

Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay

@WIRED

A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay’s new torrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker, which had been the world’s largest — and a magnet for litigation — for years. The move was prompted by the emergence of DHT and PEX technologies, which allow peers to locate one another without a tracker, the site’s operators wrote.

Hollywood lawyers, however, claim that the Pirate Bay’s tracker is alive and well and still being used under a different domain, OpenBitTorrent — which was originally registered to Fredik Neij, one of the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay.

Neij and three co-founders were convicted in Stockholm and sentenced to a year in jail each in April for facilitating copyright infringement while running The Pirate Bay. The site is a gateway to copyrighted movies, music, games and software, with 22 million registered users.

Wednesday’s development is the latest in a string of attempts by Hollywood and the Swedish government to try to shutter The Pirate Bay following the convictions. But The Bay has outrun court orders to shut down, while defeating efforts to force internet service hosts to black out the site.

A Stockholm court on Wednesday said an ISP called Parlane is not required to block OpenBittorent. The court said the ISP is not liable for any infringement the tracker may facilitate.

Hollywood’s attorney, Monique Wadsted, noted that the court did not rule on the studio’s allegations that OpenBitTorrent was a front for The Pirate Bay, a charge that’s still pending.

“The court has not touched on the link between the tracker and The Pirate Bay, and that all the .torrent files on The Pirate Bay include [OBT's] tracker as the default tracker,” she told Swedish media, according to TorrentFreak. “The day we checked, there were 550,000 works that file-sharers [could download] through the tracker.”

OpenBitTorrent denies it is a “side project” to The Pirate Bay, whose founders remain free pending appeal.

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Fix a Scratched CD

Sometimes pulling out an old CD from your music archive reveals some discs haven’t fared well in the passage of time. CDs are vulnerable to fingerprint smudges, a bit of dried syrup from the time you spilled that Coke in the car, perhaps even some scratches from the time that CD disappeared under the passenger’s seat three years ago.

If you’ve got some CDs that are well past their prime (and no, we don’t mean that perfectly unblemished Spice Girls disc you’ve been hiding from your friends), fear not. There are ways to get that disc spinning again so you can transfer the music or data to a more respectable media, like MP3s.

The first thing to try with your potentially damaged CDs is a PC. Many times a CD that’s too mangled to work in a car stereo will work just fine in your (much faster) computer CD/DVD drive.

This article is a wiki. If you still buy CDs and want to help people restore their music collection, hop on and improve this article.

Polish

If you’ve got a disc that won’t play, start with the simplest solution: give it a gentle, but thorough cleaning.

Take a damp, lint free cloth (the cloth used to clean eyeglasses works very well) and starting in the center of the CD, wipe to the outside edge in a straight line. The direction of the polishing is important, don’t wipe in circles, and don’t wipe randomly. Move in a straight line, center to edge.

Now that you’ve got all the surface blemishes off, give the CD another try. Still no luck? Well, read on.

Repairing scratches

If polishing alone doesn’t work, chance are your CD is scratched. See if you can find the offending scratch — hold your CD up to the light and check it from different angles.

CDs read from the inside out to the edge so you may be able to locate the scratch that’s causing the problem based on which tracks skip. Obviously if you CD has data rather than music this method won’t work.

Once you’ve found the scratch there are a few ways you can repair it. However, before we get started, be aware that some of these methods can actually damage the disc even more so. Use them only as a last resort.

Polish the CD Two popular ways of polishing out scratches include using toothpaste (get the kind with baking soda in it) and Brasso. In either case apply a thin layer to the scratched area and wipe from the inside out to polish out the scratch.

Wax the CD Along the same lines as the toothpaste method, you can try applying a very thin coat of vaseline, car wax or shoe polish to the scratched area.

Professional Refinishing Unless the scratch is very deep the above methods should work. If they don’t you can always try having your CD refinished by a professional service. Consult your local music store or try searching for CD refinishing in your favorite search engine.

Audio CD Scratches For some CD’s that are scratched and skipping, you can use iTunes to import the CD and attempt to fix some of the scratches. To do this go to the Preferences -> General -> Import Settings and make sure that “User Error Correction when Reading Audio CDs” is ticked. For a badly scratched CD it may take a LONG time to read it (possibly hours for one disc) but it can make some CDs quite listenable.

Future Outlook

The future of CDs looks like it is set to mirror that of the Dodo circa 1660. While music, movies and data storage devices of the future will have their own set of problems, at least we won’t have to resort to toothpaste to recover lost tunes.

The trade off is the lack of a physical medium to show off to your friends as a sign of music superiority. In other words, no more fancy album art. In many ways the album is going the way of the Dodo as well. The record industry is increasingly focusing on singles rather than congruent records.

Don’t fear, Pink Floyd fans (and other fans of congruent, thematic concept albums). Online MP3 stores, like Apple’s iTunes store, are starting to bundle album art and even extra songs and video with downloadable albums. While you still can’t frame your favorite MP3, at least you can watch the behind the scenes making of it. Better yet, you don’t have to worry about scratching your MP3 like you can a compact disc. If you lose your music, chances are, in the future, your music store will replenish the music you bought from them for you at little or no cost.

Pentagon: Zombie Pigs First, Then Hibernating Soldiers

@WIRED

Around half of U.S. troop fatalities are caused by blood loss from battlefield injuries. Now, with another 30,000 troops deploying to Afghanistan, the Pentagon is pushing for medical advances that can save more lives during combat.  The Defense Department’s latest research idea: Stop bleeding injuries by turning pigs into the semi-undead. If it works out, we humans could be the next ones to be zombified.

Military’s mad-science arm Darpa has awarded $9.9 million to the Texas A&M Institute for Preclinical Studies (TIPS), to develop treatments that can extend a “golden period” when injured war fighters have the best chance of coming back from massive blood loss. Odds of survival plummet after an hour — during combat, that kind of quick evacuation, triage and treatment is often impossible.

The institute’s research will be based on previous Darpa-funded efforts. One project, at Stanford University, hypothesized that humans could one day mimic the hibernation abilities of squirrels — who emerge from winter months no worse for wear — using a pancreatic enzyme we have in common with the critters. The other, led by Dr. Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, used nematode worms and rats to test how hydrogen sulfide could block the body’s ability to use oxygen — creating a kind of “suspended animation” where hearts stop beating and wounds don’t bleed. After removing 60 percent of the rat’s blood, Dr. Roth managed to keep the critters alive for 10 hours using his hydrogen sulfide cocktail.

The next logical step: Try the same thing on pigs. They’ve got a similar cardiovascular system to humans, and TIPS researchers Theresa Fossum and Matthew Miller think they can accurately predict human results from the swine trials. Using anesthetized pigs, the doctors are testing various compounds, some containing hydrogen sulfide, to find one that can safely keep the hemorrhaging animals “as close to death as possible.”

With a 15-person team working exclusively on the project, the institute anticipates successful results within 18 months. “Darpa wants this to happen yesterday, because it was needed yesterday,” Dr. Miller told Danger Room. Once the team comes up with the right elixir, it’ll undergo federally mandated safety testing. After that, the zombie vaccine will be sent to the battlefield for human application.

Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they’ll be “re-animated” and — hopefully — as good as new.

From rats, to pigs, to troops — to civilians. Dr. Miller anticipates dozens of medical applications, including the preservation of organs before transplants and suspension of life-threatening emergencies, like heart attacks and strokes. “Everybody’s talking about the military use of this, and that’s our focus now,” he says. “But really, this could be much, much bigger than that.”

Video: Solar Impulse First Flight

@WIRED
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Following up on the news of the first flight of the Solar Impulse, we now have video of the short hop down the runway in Switzerland.

Bertrand Piccard, the man behind the Solar Impulse program said on the team’s website that the flight might not look like much, but he believes it is an entry into a totally new and unchartered domain of flight.

“Never before – in the whole history of aviation – has an aircraft so big, so light and consuming so little energy actually flown.”

Piccard, who is an accomplished aviator and along with co-pilot Brian Jones, was the first to make an around the world balloon flight, reaffirmed plans for high altitude flights in the spring from the team’s new home in Payerne in western Switzerland.

After initial high altitude flights to approximately 30,000 feet, the team will then perform the first test of the solar and battery power combination with a 36 hour flight. The plan is to fly on solar power during the day climbing to higher altitudes, and then fly on battery power during the night while slowly descending (due to reduced power) to lower altitudes by morning.

Piccard and a team of pilots plan to make a multi-stage around the world flight in a solar powered airplane similar to the current test aircraft in 2012. Pilots will fly a single 36 hour day-night-day leg before landing at an airport to switch with another pilot. This will be repeated as they circumnavigate the globe.

Video: Solar Impulse/YouTube

For Hardware Entrepreneurs, Getting From Idea to Reality Isn’t Easy

@WIRED

The consumer electronics business, once the playground of large companies, has seen scrappy entrepreneurs charge in. But while the bar to becoming a hardware entrepreneur is lower than ever, it’s still not a gimme.

Indeed, there have been some big blowups along the way. The CrunchPad project, a stab at creating a $200 touchscreen tablet, ended abruptly this week, before the product could make its debut. Led by the opinionated Web 2.0 publisher Michael Arrington, CrunchPad was mired in delays and partner wrangling. Ultimately, after a year and a half of development efforts, Arrington declared that the idea was stillborn, blaming the company that helped him design the device, Fusion Garage. Despite that, Fusion Garage plans to go ahead with the launch next week, setting the stage for a potentially nasty legal battle.

Other projects have faced smaller but still significant difficulties. Fitbit, a $100 fitness tracker, created by first-time hardware entrepreneurs Eric Friedman and James Park, is shipping now, but its launch was delayed by months.

That’s not to say that hardware entrepreneurs are all doomed. Indeed, thanks to cheap and readily available overseas manufacturing, the bar to entering the hardware business is lower than ever. And there have been some standout successes: First-time hardware entrepreneurs have created such products as the Flip, a popular and inexpensive video recorder; the LiveScribe Pulse pen, a digital note-taking pen; the Chumby, a squeezable internet-connected display; and even new styles of notebook PCs.

So what does it really take to create a gadget? A smart product design, a realistic expectation of time and costs, and the ability to put together the right team, say entrepreneurs. Wired.com interviewed several hardware entrepreneurs to find out what works and what doesn’t.

It’s got to be more than just atoms

About three years ago, John Chuang, a former CEO of a staffing company Aquent, decided he wanted to create a new kind of PC. The device, called litl Webbook, would be a compact notebook that could be used for browsing the internet, displaying digital photos and watching TV shows. A nifty hardware trick using a pivoted hinge would allow the device to morph from the traditional notebook into a picture frame.

As Chuang drew up the plans for the machine, he became increasingly convinced he would have to think like an Apple rather than a Dell.

“Any hardware company who thinks they are just doing hardware is going to realize pretty soon that there is a software component that will become very important in their ability to differentiate,” says Chuang.

It’s the secret to the consumer electronics business in the post-iPhone world: Software and services matter as much as hardware.

“Hardware and software are inseparable,” agrees Steve Tomlin, CEO and founder of Chumby. “The wrong model is in a lot of people’s brains because of what happened with PCs,” where different companies provided hardware and software.

To deliver a high-quality consumer experience, a gadget designer has to plan the whole package: hardware, software and interface.

Having a software and services component also allows the company to be flexible, says Tomlin. Earlier this year, Chumby said it would start licensing its software to be embedded into other devices such as Blu-ray players and digital photo frames. The move, if successful, would let Chumby go beyond early adopters to a larger, more general audience.

Accept the fact that knockoffs will be easy

Hardware products are created by contract manufacturers in Asia. These are a relatively small group of companies that are willing to do business with anyone who has an idea, original or not.

The notion that you can create a mass-market consumer electronics product that can remain exclusively yours is a fallacy, say entrepreneurs. Accepting the hardware risk also makes it easier to focus on what the true value of the product is.

“If you are selling just a hardware product, the potential to be knocked off is very high,” says Jim Margraff, CEO of LiveScribe. “There’s always the risk of being copied and marginalized and in any competitive world, a standalone device means high price pressure.”

Instead, he says, raise the stakes by building a platform that can support a larger ecosystem.

Take the iPhone, for instance. If it was just about the device’s slim profile, responsive touchscreen and 3.5-inch display, creating an iPhone clone would be easy — indeed, look at dozens of cheap, unusable Chinese iPhone knockoffs. But instead, Apple’s elegant user interface and third-party app support have helped keep the iPhone ahead of its peers.

“Hardware is fast to [create] and is the easiest to copy. You can get a lot of competition very quickly,” says Chuang. “But software takes a lot of time. You can’t just replicate a great UI.”

Another option is to go open source from the beginning, says Chumby’s Tomlin. Community involvement can help refine the product and offer ideas on features you want to focus on.

“Anything we create, we are happy to open source,” says Tomlin. “Anyone can reverse engineer it anyway.”

Focus, focus, focus

Being an entrepreneur isn’t a part-time job. For gadget inventors, it can be especially grueling as they rack up the miles visiting contract manufacturers in Asia. And that’s important. Though most Asian manufacturers are used to working with international clients, the process still requires constant and close supervision.

“You want to make sure you have enough money and time,” says Chuang. “And invest in full prototypes often. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to do that and they end up with buggy products that take longer to fix.”

There are also administrative tasks such as legal contracts that require close attention. “Doing the blocking and tackling on the legal side consumes a lot of time,” says Tomlin.

“There has to be trust among partners, but remember, great walls make for trusted neighbors,” he says. “Good contracts can do the same.”

It will always take longer than you think

“When you work with big companies, you are on their schedule,” says Tomlin. “You are driven by their agendas.”

That can mean weeks of delay that entrepreneurs have little control over.

LiveScribe’s Pulse Pen product is no debutante. The product was already a hit in Target stores and has been available online through Amazon since 2008. Yet getting a wider retail distribution this year took longer than expected, says Margraff. Cautious retailers, skittish about the economy, pushed back on new product rollouts.

“Everything is later than expected,” says Margraff. “We were hoping to be in stores in time for the back-to-school seasons but we will now be there for the holidays.”

And that’s despite the “enormous interest” in the product, says Margraff. Layoffs in stores, changes in management, and fear about stocking and inventory levels pushed back product introductions.

LiveScribe now has inked deals with Best Buy, Staples and Apple to display its product in stores.

It will always cost more than you think

Gadget prototypes are always too good to be true. They promise an amazing set of features, almost always for the low, low price of $99.99. But when it’s time to ship the product, that price tag has either ballooned to $300 or some of the most exciting features have been quietly dropped.

“I have made that mistake,” says Margraff. “Most new entrepreneurs that haven’t gone through the the process are highly likely to fall on the sword.”

That’s why modeling the costs accurately is important, he says. “People make the mistake of just looking at the bill of materials without scrap, labor, overhead and profit, or [forget to] add the cost of marketing,” he says.

Creating a product out of a standard reference design is easy. Differentiation is what costs money, says Chuang.

“It is hard to deviate from the norm,” he says. “The supply chains and ODMs (original design manufacturers) are all used to building what exists and that’s where everything is cost effective.”

Even seemingly small things can add up. Take the pivoting hinge in the litl Webbook. “If you say you want to use a normal hinge but just want it to rotate a little more, it changes everything,” says Chuang.

Most gadgets also will bump up against heightened consumer expectations. Raised on a diet of subsidized $200 smartphones, consumers expect to see polished, sophisticated gadgets for a similar price.

“Smartphones, which have multiple hundreds of dollars in committed subscription standing behind them, have set expectations for that kind of value,” says Tomlin. “And that’s not easy for everyone else to deliver.”

Distribution will be difficult

Getting a product into hands of consumers also costs money. “The biggest naivete is how much money gets consumed in the channel,” says Tomlin. “Most of these companies can’t just call up Wal-mart and sell to them. They have to go through a distributor who takes a cut.”

Gadget entrepreneurs warn that it is difficult to get rapid mass-market adoption for a physical device that’s only offered online. If a few hundred early adopters is what you are gunning for, friends and family will always step in. But if you want to sell a product to millions, retail is the way to go, they say.

“The efficiency of the retail distribution channel in the U.S. is unparalleled in the world,” says Margraff.

And to become a part of that channel means throwing some money into the bucket.

“If you have to go through retail distribution, all the middlemen have to be compensated,” says Tomlin. “You have to make sure that cost of product does not balloon.”

A tip: Find a contract manufacturer who is willing to carry the financial burden of inventory, says Tomlin.

Choose your friends wisely

Using an independent design firm to create the product, as Arrington did, is standard operating procedure. Even big firms like Dell often work with independent design shops such as New Deal Design to create new products.

But it’s best to work with a firm that lets you retain the rights to your intellectual property, says Chuang. He created the litl Webbook with help from product-design and consulting firm Moto Development Group.

It’s also important to have some hardware competency on your own staff, say entrepreneurs. “That way you don’t end up wrangling over the IP,” says Tomlin.

Just owning the IP isn’t enough to stay ahead in the game, warns Chuang.

“At the end of the day, it is a very fluid market and the IP is a race against time,” he says. “The IP probably won’t protect you in the market for a long period of time, which is why it is necessary to keep a steady stream of innovations coming.”

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Acer Aspire 5738DG 3-D Notebook

@WIRED

$780  •  acer.com

6 out of 10

 

Inexpensive, Powerful Notebook Gains Nothing in 3-D

You know what? Go ahead and forget the whole “3-D” part of this notebook. Yes, it comes with polarizing lenses (and a clip-on attachment for you bespectacled Poindexters out there), and yes, it can display 3-D content.

But even if you find this 3-D material, we can assure you that you won’t want to deal with it. In fact, it’s about as compelling as a Magic Eye poster being dragged behind the back of a school bus. In other words, nothing like the experience of, say, seeing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in an IMAX theater.

No, put away the 3-D gear, change the annoying desktop wallpaper and accept the Acer Aspire 5738DG for what it is: A pretty good, very cheap laptop.

For a mere $780, the Aspire 5738DG is awfully full-featured, packed with a 2.2-GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon HD 4570 graphics card, 320-GB hard drive, and a 15.6-inch screen. The resolution is on the low side at just 1366 x 768 pixels, and the screen is decidedly dim, but otherwise the feature set is a win. It powers the machine to benchmarks we typically see in computers twice the price — and with exceptional gaming performance to boot.

Designwise, it’s a bit of a disaster, sadly. The screen is top-heavy, making the laptop prone to tipping over backwards, the numeric keypad forces the main keyboard much too far to the left for comfort, and even the machine’s latch — located inexplicably on the base of the machine instead of the lid — makes the computer difficult to open.

Then there’s the 3-D experience, which is simply baffling in its badness. The experience — including the “magical” ability to turn 2-D media into 3-D on the fly — is so downright awful it defies explanation, an exercise in janky double vision that will forever haunt my 2-D dreams.

WIRED Super-cheap, with overall impressive specs for its price level. Outstanding performance, even as a gaming rig.

TIRED 3-D technology, as implemented here, is years away from prime time. Bafflingly stupid design choices. Dim screen backlighting. Heavy.

• Style: Mid-size notebooks
• Operating System: Windows 7
• Screen Type: 3-D
• RAM size: 4GB and under
• Clock Rate: 1.51 GHz to 2.5 GHz
• Processor Manufacturer: Intel
• Hard Drive Size: 300GB to 399GB
• Optical Drive: No Optical Drive
• Manufacturer: Acer
• Price: $780
  Release Date: October 21, 2009

iPhone Officially Lands in South Korea!

A month after Apple started selling its iPhone in China, the device expanded its Asian reach Saturday with a much-heralded launch in South Korea.
In keeping with the tradition of waiting in line for hours in advance of an iPhone launch, hundreds queued up overnight outside the Olympic stadium in Seoul to snag the smartphone as soon as it officially landed amid blaring music and strobe lights. The hoopla appeared to far trump the phone’s more subdued arrival in China, where it launched in the October cold and rain to smaller-than-expected crowds.
(Credit: Apple)
KT Corp, South Korea’s second largest mobile carrier (after SK Telecom) and the local distributor of the iPhone, says about 65,000 people have preordered the device, which hit the South Korean market two months after the government approved its sale.
Mobile penetration in South Korea is high–an estimated 93 percent of the country’s population subscribes to a mobile service–but smartphones have yet to take off there due to cost, lack of apps, and high data rates by mobile carriers.
“We’re hoping that this iPhone will be a trigger point for the smartphone market in Korea,” said Yang Hyun-mi, chief strategy officer at KT Corp, according to the Canadian Press. Smartphones make up just 1 percent of all cell phones in South Korea, she said.
KT is pricing the 32GB iPhone 3GS at 396,000 won ($338) for customers who subscribe with a monthly service fee of 45,000 won (about $38). Customers who subscribe with a monthly fee of 65,000 won ($55) can get the phone for 264,000 won ($225). And premium users who sign up for monthly plans based on a 132,000 won ($113) basic rate can get the phone for free.
An 8GB iPhone, meanwhile, can be had for 132,000 won for subscribers signed on the 45,000 won monthly plans.
KT projects that iPhone sales will fall anywhere 200,000 to 500,000 units, a showing that’s widely expected to shake up the country’s mobile market. For years, the Korea Communications Commission used technical rules to stifle competition, allowing homegrown giants like Samsung and LG Electronics to take over the market, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Indeed, in good news for cost-conscious consumers, Samsung has already slashed the price of its 8GB Omnia 2 smartphone by 44,000 won ($37.50) to 924,000 won ($788).
Watch a South Korean iPhone television spot below.