Amazon S3 lets customers ship big data

By InfoWorld staff, Stephen Lawson | IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)
Amazon's S3 cloud storage service has a new option, called AWS Import/Export, for quickly uploading large amounts of information to its datacenters. It uses a well-developed, multimodal content delivery network that can transmit terabytes of data faster than a T-3 leased line.
The fact that this network is based on jets, trucks and messengers with walkie-talkies doesn't make it any less useful to enterprises, many of which have been using overnight shipping services for backups for several years, according to 451 Group analyst Henry Baltazar. Just make sure the data's encrypted in case it falls off the back of a truck or otherwise gets lost, he said.
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Air Force denies GPS danger

pcpro, by Stuart Turton
The US Air Force has refuted suggestions that the GPS network is in danger of failing next year.
A report issued by Government spending watchdog the Government Accountability Office (GAO) claimed that the GPS network was in danger of going down as the US Air Force fell behind in launching new satellites.
The startling 15-page report has prompted a rare response from the US Air Force - in Twitter form no less.
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Apple Tablet Coming in 2010?

PC World, by Jeff Bertolucci

Apple may have turned its nose up at the netbook market, but that doesn’t mean it’s ignoring the void between its $400 iPod touch (32GB) and $1,000 MacBook. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes Cupertino will launch a touchscreen tablet, priced in the $500 to $700 range, in the first half of 2010.
Rumors of an iPod-like tablet have been swirling for months, with some speculating that Apple is developing a large-screen iPod touch—say, a 7- to 9-inch touchscreen device—that would be large enough for HD movies and maybe a few desktop-style apps. Such a device would provide a better gaming experience than the iPod touch too.
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Smartphone competition: Palm Pre vs iPhone 3.0 vs Blackberry Storm 2

PC World, by Daniel Ionescu

In the next few months four smartphones are going to battle it out. The Palm Pre, the iPhone 3.0, the BlackBerry Storm 2 and the Nokia N97 are all going for the crown title this summer. But which one should you choose?While not all of these four smartphones have been officially announced, rumors have been flying around for weeks anticipating the new Apple iPhone and the second iteration of the BlackBerry Storm. And there are enough leaks out there to put head to head some preliminary specs.I'm not going to run you through all the features of these phones, you can check that in this specs table I put together. However, there are a few interesting issues that I'm going to mention.

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Table specifications...

Which mobile OS is best?

ITpro By Clare Hopping

Microsoft, Apple and Google have all announced upgrades to their operating systems in recent months, but which makes for the biggest improvement? We pit them against each other in our three-way head-to-head.
In recent months, Google, Microsoft and Apple have gone somewhat update mad, announcing major updates to their mobile platforms.
All three companies are taking very different approaches, with Google concentrating on stabilising and expanding its Android platform, Microsoft making its Windows mobile platform a little more attractive and Apple releasing features that always should have existed on the iPhone in the first place.
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How my BlackBerry survived a swim in the toilet | cnet, by Ina Fried

It's every gadget lover's nightmare and, on Wednesday, it became my reality.
My BlackBerry went for an ever-so-brief tour of CNET's plumbing facilities. I'm not sure how it ended up exactly where it did, but suffice it to say, it did. And, to answer the question before you ask, it was a clean bowl.
I pulled it out within a second of hearing that dreaded splash. I shook it off, dried it, and headed to my desk with a sheepish look on my face.
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Telecommuting nightmare: Workers use mobile devices 2 to 6 hours per week in bed, survey says | zdnet

More than 1 in 4 employees are so tethered to laptops and smartphones that they can’t resist taking them to bed with them before sleeping, according to a small survey released today.
According to the survey, 57 percent of people who work in bed do so between two and six hours every week, much to the chagrin of their partners. Amusingly, 8 percent of those polled admitted that they spend more time on their mobile devices during the evening than talking to their partners.
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Facebooking the Pope | Reuters (video)

May 22 - Just when you thought you had enough Facebook Friends, devout followers of the Vatican can soon add the Pope as a friend.
Maryam Behmard reports.
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Google: Updated Chrome is 30 Percent Faster | pcmag, by Chloe Albanesius

Google on Thursday released a version of its Chrome browser that it says is 30 percent faster than the previous version.

"We continue to make speed our number one priority," Darin Fisher with the Google Chrome Team said in a video demonstration of the new features. "Thanks to a new version of V8, our JavaScript engine, heavily interactive sites run even faster. And with a new version of WebKit, page loads time has improved significantly.
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Direct Movie and TV Downloads Coming to iPhone? | pcworld

More supposed details are leaking out about the next version of Apple’s 3.0 software update for the iPhone and iPod Touch set to be unveiled next month. The latest buzz, via the site Open Salon, is over direct downloads of TV shows and movies. The ability to directly download TV and movies to the iPhone and iPod Touch would eliminate the steps of plugging your device into your computer, launching iTunes, and performing a synchronization between the two.
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Russian group mulls Facebook investment

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A Russian Internet group, Digital Sky Technologies, has offered to invest $200 million in Facebook in a deal that would value the social networking site at $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
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Google to give libraries say on prices for scanned books

May 22, 2009 06:52 pm | IDG News Service

The University of Michigan has become the first library to amend its book scanning deal with Google, following a proposed settlement that Google reached last year with authors and publishers that sued it.
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