South Korea is already considered the country with the fastest broadband for the masses (it offers 12Mbps on average), but it's not quite satisfied with simply being first in the world. Most Western world countries are promising to guarantee everyone 2Mbps connections for the near future and the highest speeds ISPs currently offer are either 50Mbps or 100Mbps. Meanwhile, South Korea is looking to forge even further ahead by boosting its broadband speeds to 1,000Mbps (1Gbps) by 2012, according to the BBC. The South Korean government is encouraging enterprises to spend the 34 trillion Won ($30.63 billion) required to complete the scheme, a figure that is roughly comparable to the country's annual education budget.
"I think in the future we will really see a data deluge - data will explode over the network," said Lee Suk-Chae, chairman of Korea Telecom. "And you cannot handle that data traffic only through the mobile internet. Although there will be LTE, still you won't be able to handle all that traffic. Fixed line is essential to support that traffic and in that sense, I think people want to watch the content they want anywhere, anytime, and to satisfy their demands you need to have a strong network, maybe a gigabit internet." Chae says that only 10 percent of data transfer is through 3G networks in South Korea, while 70 percent comes through Wi-Fi. Given the number of hotspots in the country's urban areas and the many times faster it is, we're not surprised.
A speed of 1Gbps in the Asian nation translates to maxing out your connection at a download speed of 128 megabytes per second. In other words, downloading a 700MB movie would take 5.47 seconds, a 4.7GB DVD would finish in 37.6 seconds, and a 50GB Blu-ray disc would appear on your computer in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. It looks like many South Koreans will soon be downloading at speeds the rest of us can only dream of.
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Google CEO Eric Schmidt trash talks Windows 7
Google just took a jab at Microsoft. Oh, the search giant already did that last week, and it wasn't the first time? Yes, you're right, but now it's Google CEO Eric Schmidt targeting the software giant's biggest product, the latest version of which is particularly successful. Schmidt recently made comments about Windows 7 during a question and answer session at the 25th anniversary celebration of MIT's legendary Media Lab.
In a wide-ranging discussion with National Public Radio journalist John Hockenberry, Schmidt proclaimed that the goal of great technology is to get people to use computers less so they can be more productive. That's fine, but he didn't stop there. "The hours I spend reprogramming my PC in Windows 7 is not a very good use of my time," he told students in the MIT Media Lab auditorium according to CRN. "Why I choose to do that in the first place is a problem with judgment," he added.
We should expect more and more comments like this one from Google as the company readies its answer to Windows, dubbed Chrome OS. Schmidt has already talked about the OS before but now it's clear he's getting ready to start trash talking the competition as well. Chrome OS is slated to arrive before the end of the year. Just last week there was reason to believe that it was at the Release Candidate phase.
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Blizzard sues StarCraft II hack developers
Shortly after suspending or banning some 5,000 players for cheating on StarCraft II, Blizzard has sued individuals responsible for creating the hacks. The company has filed suit against three programmers known by the handles "Permaphrost," "Cranix," and "Linuxawesome," accusing them of developing and selling hacks for StarCraft II in violation of license agreements and copyright law.
Blizzard's suit claims that the defendants developed, marketed and distributed a variety of hacks for StarCraft II only days after launch - though we imagine most if not all carried over from the beta. "On the very day that StarCraft II was released, representatives of the hacks Web site advised members of the public that 'our staff is already planning new releases for this game'," said the filing.
Besides the obvious violation of Blizzard's user agreements, the company accused the defendants of inducing copyright infringement. "When users of the Hacks download, install and use the Hacks, they copy StarCraft II copyrighted content into their computer's RAM in excess of the scope of their limited license, as set forth in the EULA and ToU, and create derivative works of StarCraft II."
Blizzard claims the harm from the hack creators is "immediate, massive and irreparable," damaging the value of StarCraft II and wrecking the fun of legit players. That apparently translates to lost sales, especially in future content, such as the two upcoming expansions for StarCraft II. We're not sure how much Blizzard seeks in compensation, but the company bagged $6m in a similar WoW suit.
