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Comcast's Internet Essentials program expanding as digital literacy project soars
If everyone needs the internet, then poor kids need it more -- since so much learning material is dependent on technology. Comcast teamed up with the FCC to produce Internet Essentials: a $10 a month broadband plan and $150 computers to get the nation's poorest families online. Six months later, the program's been a colossal success, leading to the company adding some sweeteners: eligibility is being relaxed to include any family who qualifies for discounted lunches (swelling the catchment group by a further 300,000). It's also doubling the speed of the available connection: 3 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up and is allowing community groups to bulk-buy packages to directly supply the most impecunious households. It's also pairing up with the "connect to compete" initiative to reduce computer costs, enrich digital literacy materials and connect those outside of Comcast's core service areas. You can head on down to our source link to read the extended report and see how families are benefiting from a little corporate good deed.
Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou says Apple products are "very difficult to make"
Hon Hai, parent company of Foxconn, is blaming Apple for its poor financial performance over the past two quarters. Chairman Terry Gou confirmed the Chinese company invested heavily in its manufacturing plants to keep up with Apple's demand. He said Apple devices were "very difficult" to make. The company's profit gains were also hit hard by Foxconn wage increases, which were introduced following a rash of employee suicides and negative reports over the past few years. Gou hopes to turn things around in the last half of the year when its investment in manufacturing and lucrative Apple contracts should begin to pay off.
WoW Rookie: Save everything, sell everything
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.It's clean-up time around here. Now that the WoW Rookie Guide is up and running to shuttle you to precisely the information you've been wondering about, we're poking through our older pieces to bring them up to date. (If there are any WoW Rookies whose datedness you find especially galling, shoot me a link at lisa [at] wow [dot] com and I'll prioritize it for updating.) Sometimes during the updating process, I uncover little gems, like this excerpt from Elizabeth Harper's 2007 piece Money-making 101. Be sure to visit the entire article, by the way; it's an outstanding resource to make sure you arrive at your character's more costly milestones with gold in your pockets.In the meantime, let's talk about what's worth selling and what's not. First of all: keep everything. Make buying or making big bags a priority; after all, you can't make money if you can't bring home loot to sell. If your bags get full, sure, go ahead and destroy grey items (items with their names listed in grey letters). (To destroy an item, left-click it, drag it to an open spot on your screen, and left-click again to drop it; reply "Yes" to the dialog box that pops up.)
Forum post of the day: Born with a plastic spoon
Aside from players that are bitter because they missed out on Recruit-a-Friend benefits, is there anything wrong with this program. Kuahs of Kil'jaeden has encountered problems with raising enough cash to keep up with gear and ability upgrades. He has a level 70 character, but rerolled with his recruit on another server. He can't simply send money down from his main, and is sitting at level twenty-two with level twelve abilities. Many posters suggested sending down money from a main character, which isn't so helpful on a new server. Others made the usual suggestion of gathering skills for sale on the auction house. While this is a good suggestion, mining and herbalism will suffer the same problem of being outpaced by leveling. There is always the option of begging for gold in major cities, though I personally don't recommend this method.
Quanta planning $200 OLPC for developed nations
A lot of good things can happen when you receive a million orders for your product, such as finding the ability to add speedier hardware, offer up new renditions, and of course, break into new markets. Such is the case with Quanta, as it is reportedly aiming at bringing a device "similar to the OLPC to developed markets when the time is right," and if all goes as planned, it'll hit "for as little as $200." Of course, it was noted that the low-end versions would likely arrive sans a hard drive, with diminutive screens, and utilize open source software, but there's currently not much room to grumble if your laptop budget tops out at two Benjamins. In a quote that certainly made a case for CE-Oh No He Didn't, Michael Wang (Quanta's president) frankly stated that there were "a lot of poor people in developed countries, too," simultaneously dissing those without a large deal of disposable income and mislabeling the millionaire tinkers who'd probably pick one up just to fiddle with. No hints at a release date just yet, but if the sluggish rollout of the OLPCs is a halfway accurate benchmark, we'd guess that this one's a good ways out.[Thanks, Charbax]
The iPod dock for value-driven consumers
If you haven't throw down for one of the bazillion iPod docks out there, you may have considered just making your own. But for those out there without the technical know-how -- or more importantly, adequate funding -- you're probably stuck syncing your 'Pod flat on the desk with that plain ole cable Apple tossed in. A dissatisfied (and apparently broke) Mac user finally felt that enough was enough, and resorted to creating an iPod dock from what appears to be an old Apple accessory box, a generous helping of tape, scissors, and a black marker. While we assume any smallish cardboard box would fit the bill, using the prior home of an AirPort Express card just adds that critical dash of Apple flair to the whole creation. If you're a bit short on cash, or just admire your own handiwork, be sure to keep reading for an internal view, and then hit up the read link to peep a full gallery of construction photos so you don't screw yours up.[Via digg]
Microsoft demos "FonePlus" OLPC killer
Proving that corporate agendas sometimes can't be put aside long enough to create a unified computing platform for the world's poor, Microsoft has unveiled "FonePlus," a concept device making good on its proposal to use smartphones as the basis for sending computers deep into emerging markets. Unfortunately we've been unable to dig up any eye candy, but FonePlus looks to follow Gates' formula pretty closely: you get a CE-based smartphone (likely watered down from the full Windows Mobile package) with TV out and an external keyboard connection. The logic behind FonePlus suggests that phones and televisions are pervasive even in some of the world's poorest regions, making the product an easy sell -- plus, Internet access is part and parcel with the phone, something OLPC doesn't provide out of the box. Whether FonePlus will see production remains to be seen, but Microsoft's studying the idea closely -- and when you get snubbed by OLPC in favor of Linux, well, it's no surprise to see them come out swinging.
