Google to transform Internet experience
Google is tired of waiting on the Internet.
At least that’s the message the Internet giant is sending with its newest foray outside of its search beginnings. The company is tired of waiting on phone companies and other Internet service providers to catch up with the rest of the Web. It wants to crank the speed up a bit.
Or more like 1,000,000,000 bits.
The project goes like this: Google wants to increase the speed information travels from the cloud that is the Internet to your computer. Sure, so-called high-speed access from the average ISP is blazingly fast compared to the painstakingly slow dial-up access the world was shackled to for much of the Internet’s life, but today’s Web apps are making even the fastest connections wave a white flag of surrender.
The problem is today’s connections are built on yesterday’s technology, technology that was never really meant to deliver the mind-boggling amount of information that crosses telephone and cable lines today. They’re fine for watching TV, talking on the phone, searching the Web, sending e-mails, all that fun stuff, but as more and more of a person’s life jumps online, the pipes are getting a little clogged.
So Google has decided it’s time some new pipes were laid, and since nobody else is taking this project on, Google is ready to put its money where its mouth is. The company, based out of Mountain View, Calif., is asking cities and towns to offer to be Google’s guinea pig in its Google Fiber for Communities project. Google comes in, lays down some super-fast Internet and then steps back and sees what happens.
I am glad to see that the Topeka community has swallowed the Google Kool-Aid. Think Big Topeka sprouted up practically overnight to rally support for Topeka’s quest to become Mountain View 2. Facebook pages exploded with fans, county commissioners and city council threw their support behind the effort, local media offered to help citizens film nomination videos and Topeka was even unofficially renamed “Google” for the month of March. The groundswell of support for the project has been impressive, but it’s just beginning.
Internet, TV main news sources for Americans
A third of cell phone owners access stories on their mobiles, study says
The Internet is now the third most-popular resource for Americans' daily news, behind local and national television news, and about a third of cell phone owners are using their devices to catch up on the latest information, according to a new study.
An "overwhelming majority" of Americans — 92 percent — say they use multiple resources for news, from Web-based news sites, blogs and social networking programs like Twitter and Facebook, to more traditional fare including television, newspapers and radio, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
But, on a "typical day," six in 10 American adults get their news online, "placing it third among the six major news platforms asked about in the survey, behind local television news and national or cable television news," according to the report.
The study, which focused on trying to understand "the new news landscape" in the United States, comes at a time when many newspapers and TV stations around the country are struggling, as more Americans turn to other avenues to get their information.
Is Kathryn Bigelow changing things for Hollywood women?
Lifetime's moment: Kathryn Bigelow with her Oscars. Pic: Alex J. Berliner/BEI/Rex Features
Last night was a remarkable night for Kathryn Bigelow as she was named Best Director for her film The Hurt Locker. She was the first woman in the Oscar’s 82-year history to take that prize home.
Clutching her award, she said: “There is no other way to describe it — it's the moment of a lifetime.”
In a kind of plot that would have made a fine movie - and it may yet. The 58-year-old director had been up against her ex-husband, Avatar man James Cameron, in all the categories that mattered.
And fittingly, in the eyes of some some commentators, she took home her Academy Award on International Women’s Day.
Bigelow – whose only marriage was to Cameron (1989 to 1991) and who has no children – has tackled traditionally macho subjects head-on. Her 1991 movie Point Break tackled bank-robbing surfers and in 2002 K-19: The Widowmaker she dealt with the trials of life on a beleaguered Russian nuclear submarine. The Hurt Locker is an unflinching observation of life with a team of Army bomb disposal experts in post-invasion Iraq.
New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis said: "Something like a woman winning best director for directing an action movie and not a romantic comedy is symbolically important.
Post-Soviet Yearning
Ken Kalfus is the author of four books, two of which, “Pu-239” and “The Commissariat of Enlightenment,” are set in Russia.
Driving by a certain decrepit five-story apartment building in the Russian city of Perm in the late 1990s, you would never have imagined you were passing a locus of magic and transcendence. There had been no heat or working toilets in the building for months, and no running water; most of the tenants had stopped receiving their salaries and pensions. Feral, abandoned children hovered in packs around uncollected refuse heaped outside the building. But Gina Ochsner, traveling there at least imaginatively, has paused at the address, peered into the courtyard and come away from it with a novel of startling, redemptive beauty.
The author of two collections of short stories, Ochsner is an American who has spent limited time in Russia, none of it in Perm. Yet her first novel, “The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight,” is (despite the kitschy title) soaked in baleful authenticity, with laundry boiling on the stove and perfume doubling as an intoxicant. As she links the grim anomie of post-Soviet Russia to the delirium of magic realism, Ochsner elevates the tenants’ struggles and makes sense of their confounding times.
Azade, a Muslim woman whose family was deported from North Ossetia, maintains the courtyard latrines, reading in their emerging odors the unfulfilled dreams and about-to-be-realized anxieties of her patrons while she rations out the toilet paper. Her Jewish neighbor Olga works for the Perm edition of the military newspaper Red Star, translating into reassuring euphemism the horrific news from Chechnya. Olga’s son, Yuri, a shell-shocked army vet who dreams of being a fish, leads desultory interpretive tours at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, Geology and Anthropology, where the exhibits are entirely fake.
JENNIFER HUDSON WEDDING — IT’S ON!
The dress. The date. The rings. Jennifer Hudson and David Otunga are racing to the altar!
Jennifer and David, the singer’s lawyer turned WWE wrestler fiancé, are ready to tie the knot, he tells Life & Style in an exclusive interview.
“We’ve picked a date,” David, who is currently an NXT Rookie on the show WWE NXT on Syfy, tells Life & Style. “And Jennifer has chosen her dress, but she won’t tell me much about that, obviously.” The couple, who got engaged in fall 2008, are the proud parents of David Jr., who was born in August.
As for the rings, the couple have their mind made up already. “We know who we want to design them — Neil Lane, he made our engagement rings,” says David. “And he’s a personal friend as well.”
And David, whose love of flashy clothes extends beyond the wrestling ring, already has a plan in mind for his suit: “I want my son and I to wear matching custom tuxedos!”
Is it possible that we’ll see some former American Idols at the reception? “It would be great if any of the former American Idols sang at the wedding. And it would be wonderful to have Jennifer sing — I’d love that.” But don’t expect David to belt out anything at the microphone, “I don’t sing!” he says, laughing.
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