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EE could soon ditch Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U
A strategic shift by the UK's largest mobile operator could leave a nasty taste in the mouths of Carphone Warehouse and its new partner Dixons. The Telegraph reports that just weeks after the two UK retailers confirmed plans to merge in a £3.6 billion deal, EE is deciding whether to end its relationship with Carphone Warehouse, and possibly Phones4U, as it looks to work more closely with customers. EE is expected to make an announcement "within weeks," and could involve dropping either one of its partners, or both. If EE was to sever ties with newly-formed Dixons Carphone, it would lose direct sales from over a thousand high-street stores, which puts more pressure on its own stores to pick up the slack. However, it already counts more than 30 million customers, has a one-third share of the UK market and recently announced plans to boost its retail presence across Britain. Carphone Warehouse has prided itself on being the best place to independently compare deals, but with Three already flying solo and EE set to follow, it could seriously undermine the retailer's claims.
How to use TradeSkillMaster 2
WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! TradeSkillMaster is the only addon you need to make millions of gold, and it's the only way to do that without expending an unreasonable amount of energy crafting and auctioning the items you sell. It's just been completely overhauled for version 2, and you should know that: Version 1 is never being updated again. When it stops working, probably on 5.4 patch day, it's never going to get fixed. Version 2 forces you to completely redo all your settings. There are no imports of your old groups or anything else. Basically, you have no choice: if you want to use TSM (and no other addon comes within spitting distance of being as useful as it for gold-making), you have to upgrade to 2, and you're going to have to redo everything. If you're really unlucky, an addon updater might have already overwritten your old version with the new one and taken all your setup with it. Version 2 took me a few days to get to the point I'm at now where I can do almost everything I did with my version 1 settings. In fact, I found all my experience with TSM 1 caused this process to take longer than it would have if I was completely new to the addon. Some concepts (like groups) are now very simple and intuitive, but it took me a while to get over my experience using TSM 1 groups. That said, once I made the jump, I found that things are faster now and I expect I'll be able to make my gold with less effort. There are some things that are gone (or moved) but once I decided to try going without them, I realized I didn't miss them as much as I thought I would. There's plenty of help, but diving right in, here's what you need to know to get started with TSM 2:
European carriers take shots at Nokia's Lumia line without leaving cover
Reuters reports that four big European carriers are disappointed by Nokia's Lumia range and its ability to compete with the big hitters from Apple and Samsung. None of the naysayers have been named, but an executive from one of the companies has been quoted as saying that "no one comes into the store and asks for a Windows Phone" and that Lumia handsets would be "easier to sell" if they ran Android. Another said Nokia should "lower the price" in order to make the Lumia range a loss leader and "get it out of the door." Meanwhile, AT&T claims to be having a different experience in the U.S., having gone to unusual lengths to market the Lumia 900 (even if that recent Time Square fandango was all Nokia) and now seeing it sell out in "many stores." That proactive approach appears to contrast with the attitude taken by some of Reuters's European insiders, who insist that all they can do is "open our stores to [Nokia] and train our staff to sell the phones."
Nokia Siemens promises better TD-LTE and CDMA coverage, no alarms or surprises
So, Nokia Siemens Networks wasn't fibbing when it said it would re-focus its efforts on mobile broadband. It's just announced a 'six pipe' radio head upgrade for time division LTE (TD-LTE) base stations that can boost capacity by 80 percent and coverage by 40 percent compared to a traditional three-sector site. Alternatively, the same replacement can be used to reduce a station's running costs, by allowing it to cover three sectors using a single radio head. As far as we're concerned, anything that recalls OK Computer is a good thing, but if it speeds up carriers' shift to LTE then it's even better. Meanwhile, for those who still want to invest in CDMA, Nokia Siemens is pushing it's 1X Advanced technology, which also promises big improvements in voice and data capacity as well as energy efficiency. Read on for more technical details in a PR double-shot.
ESPN will go all MPEG-4 in July
For better or worse, ESPN is planning to pull its MPEG-2 feeds at the end of June and transmit to affiliates solely in MPEG-4. Like HBO, ESPN already transmits all of its channels in MPEG-4 via satellite and will save money by cutting out the older backups, but since most cable companies are still sending streams to customers in MPEG-2 (although some are following DirecTV's lead) they'll need to transcode the signal an extra time which could affect the picture quality. Multichannel News mentions ESPN is supplying the necessary Motorola decoders to affiliates that need them, at this point all we can do is wait until July and see if there's any notable difference in sports quality on our end of the pipe. [Thanks, Chevelleman]
China to impose more restrictions on foreign online games
We've mentioned some of the issues that China's licensed World of Warcraft operator The9 faces with bringing Wrath of the Lich King to market, and what this latest round of regulation could mean for the the operator. The government's newfound concern with controlling exactly what content exists in online games played in China may have an impact that goes far beyond World of Warcraft. Other foreign MMOs are presently operating in China, while others have their eyes on this growing market.JLM Pacific Epoch cites (the Chinese-language news portal) Sohu, which reports that the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) will "tighten approval criteria for online game imports in an effort to protect the development of online game enterprises and avoid the excessive penetration of foreign culture among Chinese youth."
Functions and Operators Card for FileMaker Pro
Remember those days in high school when you'd frantically write all of the facts and figures you were supposed to memorize onto your arm with a Bic pen? If you've grown up and are now a FileMaker Pro developer, Steve Wilmes Consulting has just the thing to help you remember all of the functions and operators for FileMaker Pro versions 7 - 9. The Functions and Operators Card for FileMaker Pro can be very useful if you slept through your FileMaker Pro training.This card is double-sided, 8.5" x 11" in size, UV coated, and absolutely jam-packed with information you'll need to figure out what you're doing in FileMaker Pro. The screenshot to the right shows you just how detailed this info is. The card is spill-proof, so dumping that grande Macchiato on it isn't going to harm anything. The Functions and Operators Card for FileMaker Pro sells for $8.95 plus shipping. The website notes that a "Scripts and More Card" will soon be available as well. [via prMac]
Spotlaser: Reinterface with Spotlight
Several folks in our most recent Ask TUAW post were complaining about Spotlight's interface, so it's rather serendipitous that today I ran across Spotlaser. This app provides a much more useful search interface to Spotlight by making it easier both to run searches by allowing boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT), wildcards, and more. And even better, the results are displayed as a Smart Folder in a Finder window (above) rather than Spotlight's default, hard-to-use list. For those of you fed up with trying to use Spotlight, give Spotlaser a whirl and see if it makes your searching go better.Spotlaser is a free download, but the developer requests donations.[Via MacApper]
NTSB to bus drivers: don't talk and drive, pretty please
While we know there are fanatics out there claiming that cellphones are a tumor's best friend, we're still skeptical of just how dangerous they really are -- but only in that sense. Operating a motor vehicle while keying in an old pal's number certainly isn't a recipe for safe driving, and these acts would probably make protective parents irate if, say, their kid's bus driver was chatting it up while make the rounds. Although we find it quite astounding that cellphone use while operating a school / motor bus isn't already outlawed, it's even more amazing to find that the National Transportation Safety Board is simply "urging" federal and state governments to ban motor coach and school bus drivers from using cell phones except in emergencies. So just as a heads-up, you may want to check with your local school board to make sure John and / or Jane Doe aren't discussing the news while wheeling your offspring around town, as apparently it's still not entirely illegal.[Via TheWirelessReport]
