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We can hear you now: Verizon LTE to go live next year

Verizon's Executive Vice President and CTO Dick Lynch yesterday said LTE is expected to launch in the US approximately one year from now.

The Third Generation Partnership Project's Long-Term Evolution, otherwise known simply as LTE, is the 4G iteration of GSM technology. Companies are beginning to show off their developing hardware platforms, but LTE has not yet been standardized and still generally considered to be in its infancy.

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Sun expands OpenSolaris to laptops and data centers

Sun Microsystems is today unveiling a new edition of OpenSolaris tooled to data center deployment, along with plans with Toshiba to roll out a line of at least two laptops which will run the open source operating system.

With a set of announcements today, Sun Microsystems is moving its open source OpenSolaris operating system in directions ranging from large data centers to Toshiba laptops, according to Charlie Boyle, director of Solaris marketing.

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EA game sales weak, company adjusts outlook

Recession spending continues to take its toll on Electronic Arts. The software company yesterday announced its guidance for fiscal 2009 would be adjusted downward as a result of weaker-than-expected sales.

EA's earnings have diminished despite a strong 2008 portfolio of video game releases.

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European availability zone opens for Amazon EC2

In a move that will extend the Web's biggest cloud to encompass much of the globe, the company that began as an online bookstore is opening its commercial server hosting platform to the EU.

The basic Amazon EC2 cloud services platform is now open to customers in the European Union. While this will bring Amazon's managed hosting alternative closer to potentially thousands more customers, they'll be paying slightly higher fees than in the US.

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Sony to finally open its PS3 online universe tomorrow

Today, Sony announced that its PlayStation 3 virtual world Home will be officially opened tomorrow, two years after it was initially announced. The free online service is the first console-based metaverse.

Creating a whole world for PlayStation 3 users is no small undertaking. First unveiled nearly two years ago, Sony's Home attempts to combine the online metaverse concept with the entertainment of console-based network gaming. Users create 3D avatars and home spaces where they can customize content, socialize, or play games.

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'The cow goes moo,' 2008 edition

Speakaboo this week rolled out its holiday edition, which simultaneously allows you to bond with the kid in your life, contribute to a worthy cause, and have Principal Skinner tell you a story. How's that for multitasking?

The

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Beyond Ubuntu, IBM considers other Virtual Desktop environments

With the economy squeezing IT budgets, IBM hopes that the recently unveiled Virtual Desktop solution for Ubuntu Linux will be followed by similar company announcements for other Linux distributions, an IBM official told BetaNews.

IBM is interested in participating in a whole series of Virtual Desktop announcements for running users' desktops on Linux servers, according to Inna Kuznetsova, cross-IBM Linux executive, in an interview with BetaNews Tuesday afternoon.

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The Amazon Honor System, 2001-2008

The "tip jar" system that provided a donation option for thousands of small sites in the early 2000s and raised millions for survivors of Hurricane Katrina and other disasters will turn off the lights on Thursday.

The Amazon Honor System launched after the implosion of the first dot-com era, offering small sites a means by which visitors could offer their support for the costs of furnishing well-liked content.

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MySpace falls into Google's OpenID arms

Social-networking drama continues this week as MySpace plights its open-identification troth to Google Friend Connect. It also announced a name change for its own universal-login system.

The announcement came on the heels of news from both Facebook and Google that their respective OpenID systems are out of beta.

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Parallel programming model adopted by AMD, Nvidia, among others

The graphics processor that's typically relegated to the process of filling triangles in geometric space with color, took a huge step closer to becoming an all-purpose code execution tool today, with the ratification of OpenCL 1.0.

Most PCs today have a minimum of two extraordinarily powerful processing mechanisms, and I'm not talking about "cores." The first is a compilation of multiple cores -- today, more often as many as four per unit, for 16 in a four-way server. The second uses a fundamentally different architecture, designed for pipelining identical instructions that are repeated tens of thousands of times, to be executed in parallel, in a process that on paper resembles the stretching and folding of taffy.

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Level 3 to lay off 450, hires new president/COO

Fiber-and-telecom giant Level 3 will lay off around 450 employees, making up eight percent of its workforce, according to information released by the Broomfield, Colo.-based company on Tuesday.

The layoffs are expected to be confined to North American operations. The CDN (content delivery network delivery markets) groups, which handle video streaming services and the like, are not expected to take any cuts. The layoffs are starting now and should be effected by the end of December.

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Google intros an unlocked 'developer's' G1 model for global use

Google is now offering an unlocked version of HTC's Android-based G1 phone which can be used almost anywhere. Priced at $399, the phone also contains features geared to advanced developers...if you don't mind its shipping costs.

Like T-Mobile, Google is now selling an unlocked version of HTC's Android-based G1 phone which is suitable for use just about anywhere, even outside the US. But Google's Android Dev Phone 1 -- ostensibly for developers -- is different from T-Mobile's because, among other things, it is flashable.

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From LG to 4G: The first LTE phone chipset

At a research facility in Anyang, South Korea this morning, LG unveiled its Long Term Evolution (LTE) chipset, which it claimed is the first designed to provide mobile handsets with 4G connectivity.

The company claims the new 4G technology could provide downlink speeds of 60 Mbps and 20 Mbps and higher.

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Microsoft open-sources a chunk of its Channel 9 code

Proving its refreshingly serious intent to become a truly contributing member of the open source community, Microsoft this week is releasing part of the engine for its own development blogs.

A recent incarnation of MSDN's very popular Channel 9 blog (one of Microsoft's best ideas in its history) remodels its ASP.NET infrastructure to take advantage of Microsoft's model-view-controller architecture. ASP.NET MVC is the system where the software components responsible for creating, assembling, and requesting data are kept separate from one another, resulting in simpler, faster code.

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TiVo debuts ads during fast-forward and pause

With the TiVo Pause Menu that launched today, even if a user is fast-forwarding through the traditional ad breaks on a time-shifted program, he will still be subject to "premium" ads designed to appear in the truncated space.

The new system, announced this morning, would enable ads to be served during fast-forward or pause states.

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