ViPlus.BlogSpot.Com: Shares

Most wireless carriers are doing all they can to cut back on data use or charge customers more. Karma has a different way of doing things with its 4G mobile hotspots. You get free data on your account for sharing your 4G access with other people. Karma gives 100 MB of free 4G data to everyone.

The Karma 4G hotspot will cost $69 and when the user signs up, they get 100 MB of free data. When the user goes around other people with their 4G hotspot, strangers and friends can join the open network the device makes. Users who join the open Karma hotspot network will have to sign in via their Facebook account.

When the users sign in using Facebook, they also get 100 MB of free data and the owner of the device gets an extra 100 MB of free data. Basically, you get free data when you let strangers share your device. If no one signs into your device to give you free data, you can buy more data for $14.99 per gigabyte. Karma operates on the Clearwire 4G WiMax network.

[via Gottabemobile]

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Ubuntu Dev Summit, Mark Shuttleworth Shares Plans for Ubuntu 12.04

Posted on October 31, 2011 by TechCrunch in Tech & Gadgets

The Ubuntu Developer Summit, starting today in Florida, is a gathering of Canonical employees, industry partners and Ubuntu community members to “define the focus and plans for [the] up-coming version of Ubuntu”. That version, 12.04 codenamed “Precise Pangolin”, will be released in April of 2012 and will be the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of the distribution. The changes scheduled for 12.04 are interesting, and simultaneously represent the current state of the art of the Ubuntu distribution as well as represent the foundation on which future developments will be built. I spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s Benevolent Dictator For Life, about what to expect in Ubuntu 12.04 and beyond.

First and foremost, Shuttleworth pointed out that the support schedule for 12.04 has been extended from three to five years on the desktop. Ubuntu LTS releases have historically provided three years of support on the desktop (five on the server), with new LTS versions coming out every two years. With 12.04, desktop users will enjoy support through 2017, which is a pretty long time to offer support for a desktop operating system.

I asked Shuttleworth what the motivation was for extending the 12.04 support offering on the desktop and he immediately responded “corporate deployments.” There are a number of companies standardizing on Ubuntu for their desktop computing needs, and the three year support from prior LTS releases was proving inadequate. Large corporations don’t adopt the latest and greatest technologies quickly, and they often have long QA processes to ensure that new desktop operating systems will properly function with their fleet of legacy applications. (Just look at how many companies are still in the transition process from Windows XP to Windows 7!)

Shuttleworth pointed out that there’s a growing change in attitude toward corporate computing. As more and more applications move “to the cloud”, IT departments are seeing that there’s less and less need for expensive desktop lock-in. Something like Ubuntu provides sufficient computing resources for a great many environments, and is free from licensing fees.

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