Check out CNN.com&#39;s Wireless Life
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Sprint and Nextel announced plans for a $36 billion merger Wednesday, creating a new major wireless phone power with a customer base to challenge its two larger rivals.
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Plus: Happiness is a warm electrode? Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Also: Toughest gadgets on the planet. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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The Wireless company buys up AT & #038;T to become the nation & rsquo;s largest wireless provider. Also: Robotics company sets out to make the military intelligent & hellip;. Microsoft announces new server software & hellip;. and more.
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(InfoWorld) - Forget isolation and relaxation. For the seriously connected geek of today, vacations just aren't what they used to be. An informal and completely unscientific poll of InfoWorld readers revealed that -- although a few certified techies unplug completely when on vacation -- most elect to stay at least somewhat connected with their regular life; thanks to the ever-broadening range of cellular and wireless networks, most of them can. [See InfoWorld's Top 10 geek vacation list.] Jeff Helm witnessed the transition at one vacation spot: "I first took the family to Pigeon Forge (near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park) in October 2001. I walked across the hotel parking lot to the new public library to get on the Internet and check mail. I was told I would have to fill out a form, pay $5, let them hold on to my driver's license, and swear that I wouldn't 'conduct any business' or credit card transactions of any kind." Fast-forward to August 2006: "We went to the same hotel. I got out of the car to check in, and my PDA gave an audible report that it found a wireless signal. Yes, the same library was now beaming invitations to connect to the Internet to everyone in the area. Every hotel â¦ did the same. I checked e-mail at the outside mall, waiting for a patio table at the restaurant, and just about every place I went. I shut off the audible alert because the thing was going off constantly with all the networks." "The Outer Banks of North Carolina have a full complement of Net hotspot and cell-phone coverage capabilities," writes Peter B. Young. "I like to sit in the shade of an upper deck on our mansion-of-the-week, my sturdy old laptop plugged into an outlet in the living room or often out on the deck itself, and let 'er rip -- as gentle southern breezes caress my worn and wounded body." Rand Foster recommends cruising the San Juan Islands in northwest Washington between                                                     Vancouver Island and the mainland: "There is Wi-Fi at every marina." Brad St. Pierre found the perfect combo in Canada's Northwest Territories: "At the Bayside B and B in Yellowknife, I could watch the lakeside airplane and boat activity from the lounge or deck all day while surfing the Net. With almost 24 hours of sunshine, it's never too late to do the things you forgot to do while you were online." High-tech contractor David G. Evans found a way to have his vacation and get paid for it, too. "I was on call for production support. I spent a few weeks grooming my contacts to text me if they had an issue. That being done, I found a wonderful camp spot in Seaside, Calif., 20 seconds from pristine dunes and the ocean, 15 minutes from downtown Monterey, private, inexpensive, and well equipped. The recreation room has two hookups for Internet and a Web-mail kiosk. "Since this was an East Coast contract, I would get up at 4:30 or 5 to do a quick message check and reply as a first-thing-in-the-morning connection for them. Then we would drive to the Monterey Bay Aquarium but leave me three blocks away at the Kinko's with my laptop, where access is free, 24 hour, and comfortable. I would spend an hour or two working, then wander down to the wharf to meet them for some exhibits and lunch. If there was work, I would check back at Kinko's; if not, we had family time. Except for some mad coding from the backseat of the Volvo, plugged into the cigarette lighter for a portion of the trip home, this was the best working vacation I ever had." Edward C. Horvath had the best idea for a busman's holiday: "Buy yourself a ticket to the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Live on caffeine, sugar, new technology, and the famed Jobs Reality Distortion Field for a week." The prize for the most far-out connected experience has to go to Savio Rodrigues, one of the authors of our Open Sources blog. He proudly sent us a photo from Machu Picchu -- not of himself, but of his BlackBerry, with a strong connection. A close second: April Harris Calderwood's working vacation, "going to a third-world country and helping a community project with technology; you rest and give back to the community."
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Meet the 400-pound gorilla of Chinese wireless add-ons.
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You know itâs been a strange week when youâre mulling over cellular plans for your pet. But I seem to be doing just that. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based PetsMobility Networks is developing a phone that clips to your dogâs collar. Fido can hear his masterâs voice and, I suppose, respond in kind. Iâm not entirely convinced this is a good idea. I can just see Apache running up my cell bills with crank calls (âDo you have Alpo in the can?â).
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Featured links from the CNET Blog Network
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The TC40 conference, which (important caveat) I did not attend, had a big impact on the space I occupy. Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on Techmeme, but it is important, and for the two days of TC40, most of the top articles had something to do with the conference. Yet most of the people in the TechMeme loop were not there. This makes me wonder if we can do better with these conferences that become the cursor for a few days. And the answer is of course we can. But it may mean reconfiguring the conference to take the emphasis off the people in the room and put it on the people on the net. As Jim Forbes points out, if you wait for hotels to change, you're going to wait a long time. They're not really in the conference business, they're in the bedroom business. So anything that keeps people out of the hotel is likely to stay out of the conference -- like really terrific networking. So that suggests a different approach, one that does not rely on hotels.  I've done four conferences, three of them at universities, and one at CNET in San Francisco. At two of them, we hosted as many people as they did at TC40, because we had multiple tracks, and a very large facility. And the last three were all very much present on the net. The first, not so much. If I do another conference, we'd try to push the envelope on the net side of things, and probably not try to host as many people in person. Instead of 500 to 1000 people, I'd try for 50 to 100 people. Kind of a middle-ground between the experts at the TC40 conf, and the audience. More like a TV studio than a conference. Everyone would be either a blogger or reporter. All would be encouraged to participate. And everyone would lead a chat room, or a blog comment section, or a video track. We could have much more diverse video nowadays, because of services like justin.tv and ustream.tv, and I'm sure many others, who provide outbound bandwidth. All we'd need at the facility is enough bandwidth to connect to these services, and if you're not at a hotel, that's not at all hard these days. You could do it at Stanford or Cal, or even the Hillside Club. If you're not deep inside a building with thick walls, EVDO can serve as a backup. If you can't get on through the LAN, try a WAN instead.  I'd also like to see less of a focus on the interests and success stories of venture capital. Something has really changed, even the VCs seem to know it. Money is undifferentiated, so why pay so much attention to what the money people say. Let's get people with big ideas to contribute them, and to disagree with other people with big ideas. That's not to say I'd exclude the money people. But I would insist that they be people who are participating in the networked conversation, not just at the show, but 24 by 7, on blogs, on Twitter, on whatever. I had this discussion with Loic last week. I didn't think and still don't think that it was a good idea for him to have French politicians speak at LeWeb last year. I didn't think it was a good idea for Chris to invite John Edwards to speak at Gnomedex in 2006. Why? Because these people don't have blogs, they don't understand the net. They want to use it, for sure, to get money and votes, but they don't have a vision for it, beyond that, so what they have to say is uninteresting. "Give me money. Vote for me." That's all they say. If they want to come, great, let them listen and ask questions. And look for politicos (as with the VCs) who are making a difference on the net. People like Fred Wilson or Paul Kedrosky, for example. I'm sure there are many more. And I'd work to develop more ways for the back-channel to participate, to come to the front. That's the key to the future of conferences, how to extend them into the net, so the communication path is every way imaginable, not just from the venue out to the world. I want to feel like I'm in a nerve center, whether I'm at the venue or sitting in my living room in Berkeley. I had that feeling, btw, or an inkling of it, watching the AlwaysOn conference eariler this year, which had excellent presence on the net, real-time. The TC40 conference promoters, amazingly, actively thwarted the back channel. I don't know what their thinking was, but I think it was wrong.  Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you're going and are excited about it. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap. I'd also like to see a mix of interviews and debates, and open discussion. Dinners in every major city that wants to have them. The truly great tech conferences of the future will be world wide events, as the web itself is world wide, and will be inclusive, not exclusive, and cost very little to participate in, if not $0. Mundeemo: "Don't forget a row of suicide booths.."
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Plus: Cisco posts higher quarterly profit...RealNetworks reports leap in quarterly earnings...Time Warner earnings perk up. Check back for latest.
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One of the best things I like about the Internet is the boundary-less nature of this amazing network. I can check out user views of people (from here in India) around the world on the India issues.
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Also: NASA officials to make historic trip to China. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Also: Software speaks dogs' language. See what people are saying on News.com Extra.
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CNET (www.cnet.com), where people go  to discover the latest in tech and consumer electronics, and a property  of CNET Networks, Inc.
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roundup Plus: Toshiba tinkers with Wi-Fi for TV...Music promoter offers concert downloads...WS-I tackles Web services attachments.
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You&#39;re always connected. No dial-up or extra phone line. Blazing fast downloads, money-back guarantee, 24x7 service. Awesome news, entertainment and sports content.  Check for availability.
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Yesterday's piece, lightly edited, on the Huffington Post. http://x98.us/jz  I think it looks pretty good over there!