Items tagged with cab
It seems like such an obvious feature, but Uber's car-hailing app did not have a way to easily split fares until this week. Now, at last, users can ride together without worrying about settling up later. Now, riders can just request a pick-up, tap the 'up arrow' near the driver information, tap the 'Split Fare' option, select your friend and hit 'Send.' Then, your friend will get a notification that someone is about to split a fare with them, and then can accept or reject. (But don't worry, they'll accept.) It's the latest feature to an app + service that's truly disrupting the taxi industry at large. Still, pricing remains fairly high, but as soon as normal yellow cabs can become an integral...
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Cabs really haven't changed much over the years. Sure, some of them now accept credit cards, and some of them arrive when you hail via your smartphone, but by and large things are mostly the same as they always have been. But now, it feels like the future is finally catching up with the taxi business. The city of London already has a growing network of free Wi-Fi hotspots, but taking them into the cab would certainly be a new approach. Reportedly, Eyetease has secured approval to equip taxis with Wi-Fi antennas that would give riders 15 minutes of gratis Internet for sitting through a 15 second advertisement. The antenna will hop between 3G and 4G towers as the vehicle moves about, in theory...
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Verizon has a good thing going with their FiOS bundled service packages.(fiber-optic service that can simultaneously deliver TV, fast Internet and telephone) Its appeal is based around the very fast upload and download speeds that their fiber-optic cable can deliver. They've become a kind of de facto alternate for cable TV and Internet service for people dissatisfied with what's available in their area. But FiOS service has been introduced in a helter-skelter manner, with vast areas of Verizon's telephone service map being unable to purchase it even if they wanted it. That's about to change, as Verizon has announced a plan to expand availability of their Internet service. The New...
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Now here's a sport we can all enjoy: Speedcabling. Contestants are given a rat's nest of six tangled ethernet cables and are timed as they try to unravel them. The very first speedcabling event was held in an art gallery in Los Angeles. Matthew Howell is my new hero. Very Zen in his technique. "The finals were brutal - 12 ethernet cords, some as long as 25 feet, all knotted into a nasty bundle," said eventual winner [Matthew] Howell.Explaining his detangling technique, he said: "Each cable is its own rabbit hole. So before going down one of those cable paths, up and around, weaving in and out, you have to pull it apart. You have to pull the pieces out, and really call on the element of...
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A massive volume of telecommunications data flows through undersea cables. We've seen the havoc that's created when one of them is severed, and it looks like the middle-east and western Asia are now experiencing the trouble created when 4 of them are damaged in a little less than a week.Having one cable damaged is unusual, 2 or more in the same time period is very odd, but 4 is virtually unprecedented.“Most telecommunications experts and cable operators say that sabotage seems unlikely, but no one knows what damaged the cables or whether the incidents were related.One theory - that a wayward ship traveling off course because of bad weather was responsible for cutting the first two cables...
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Netflix is making deals with electronics makers to allow their rental service customers to (eventually) stream high-definition video directly to their televisions. Netflix has been tinkering with the idea of offering their own set-top box, but seem to be abandoning that idea in favor of working with established manufacturers of televisions and various set-top boxes. LG Electronics might be the first manufacturer to join up with Netflix, by integrating the player into a future version of their hybrid HD DVD/Blu-ray player.The partnership will extend a novel feature from Netflix, announced a year ago, that allows paying subscribers to watch any of 6,000 movies and television shows on its Web site...
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Comcast-related news hasn't been positive lately, at least from a user's standpoint, as Comcast has been proven to be blocking P2P communications. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has weighed in on that one. This week at the CableNEXT conference, some positive news: Comcast Chief Technology Officer Tony Werner said in his Wednesday keynote that 20% of homes would be DOCSIS 3.0 capable by the end of 2008.Cable companies may have made a name for themselves as speed kings early in the broadband wars, but the current bandwith limitations of DOCSIS 1.1 leave it looking paltry indeed when compared to Verizon's FiOS 50Mbps down/30Mbps up packages. DOCSIS 3.0 won't completely close the gap...
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The least Hot Hardware in the world might be your set-top cable box. It unscrambles your signal and changes the channel. The FCC thought it would sex up the lowly technology and spur competition by requiring set-top boxes be configured to allow the end user to purchase the box, with an installable card supplied by the cable provider to make it go. But the law of unintended consequences kicked in. The retail market for set-top boxes is essentially non-existent, and now cable companies say they must raise prices on all those rented boxes to cover the cost of the more expensive hardware. Cable-trade groups have said consumers would see $2 to $3 more in monthly rental rates for the new boxes,...
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CableLabs, Intel to Bring OpenCable Platform to Future Intel Consumer Electronics Products Member Companies Collaborate to Deliver Innovative Set-Top Boxes for Interactive Services SANTA CLARA, Calif. and LOUISVILLE, Colo., June 25, 2007 — Intel Corporation and CableLabs, the technology consortium of cable operators, announced today that the two companies have signed an OpenCable* Platform Agreement and will include support for the OpenCable Platform in future Intel consumer electronic (CE) system-on-a-chip (SoC) products. Incorporating support for OpenCable allows digital televisions, set-top boxes, digital media...
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Here's what happens when you mix overly restrictive DRM technologies with the bureaucracy of cable companies, the MPAA, the FCC, ATI/AMD, and numerous other players. MaximumPC is working on a review of three home theater PCs for an upcoming issue, and while they were impressed with many facets of the machines, they came away disappointed in regard to ATI’s OCUR and the machines’ support for protected digital cable content. "Here’s a little background if you’re not familiar with OCUR. Following an FCC mandate, cable companies must now allow their customers to access their services using third-party equipment, as opposed to forcing them to rent a set-top box from the service provider....
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Apple has announced that the iPhone will go on sale on June 29th. The phone has a large touchscreen, will play video, play music, and display and store photos. Apple is hoping for --and can expect-- a sort of frenzy usually reserved for hard -to-find toys at Christmastime for the units, which come with either 4 or 8 gigabytes of flash memory and will cost $500 or $600 respectively. Worldwide cellphone sales are running at about 1 billion units a year, and Jobs noted that if Apple took a 1 percent market share in 2008, that would mean the company would sell 10 million iPhones. The debut of the iPhone poses a challenge to other handset makers such as Motorola Inc. and Nokia,...
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PCI Express External Cabling Specification Completed by PCI-SIG Enables New Usage Models Such as Platform Disaggregated I/O, Chassis-Chassis Expansion I/O and Others BEAVERTON, Ore. - February 7, 2007 - PCI-SIG(R), the Special Interest Group responsible for PCI Express(R) industry-standard I/O technology, today announced the availability of the PCI Express External Cabling 1.0 specification, which extends the PCI Express (PCIe(R)) interconnect architecture "outside the box." Cables using the PCIe technology will be used for external applications, as well as applications internal to an enclosure that need a cable connection. The PCIe External Cabling specification provides guidelines for a practical...
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Recent HH Forum n00b sladesurfer shows us how it is done. Slade's super clean cabling job would make even ol' BW envious. Tip number 1 - route those wires and tubes anywhere but over the motherboard... Boy's got some water coolin' going on in there too. Very niiiice slade-man, very nice....
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To coin a phrase from a very well respected colleague, Ars Technica has a bit of "put your ass in the know tonight" (that's PYAITK) with a look-ahead at the DOCSIS 3 Cable Modem standard. Oh baby, glorious bandwidth! "Any geek will tell you that there's no such thing as "too fast" when it comes to broadband speeds, and that's why the recent DOCSIS 3.0 spec is exciting to cable modem users. The new version of DOCSIS (Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications) will allow for jaw-dropping physical layer speeds of 160Mbps downstream and 120 Mbps back up - more than a fourfold increase over current rates." Jaw-dropping they said... "jaw dropping". Yes...
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