availability

Buffalo 802.11ac Wi-Fi solution hits store shelves

Finally, it's here.

The much-anticipated next generation of Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac, is now available for purchase, thanks to Buffalo.

The company announced today the availability of the AirStation WZR-D1800H wireless router and WLI-H4-D1300 wireless media bridge. It's important that the two devices are available at the same time, since you'll need to get both of them to enjoy 802.11ac speeds, which is about three times faster than even the fastest Wireless-N (802.11n) solution. The WLI-H4-D1300 media bridge is designed to hook up to four Ethernet-ready devices to the new 802.11ac-based Wi-Fi network created … Read more

AT&T Avail by ZTE hands-on: A compact Gingerbread GoPhone

NEW ORLEANS--In addition to showing off its V96 tablet this year here at CTIA, ZTE also displayed its AT&T Avail. The device is a prepaid GoPhone that retails for $129.99.

Equipped with a 3.5-inch TFT touch-screen display, the Avail has a 600MHz processor and includes 512MB of RAM.… Read more

The 404 887: Where we're bleeding $99 HP TouchPads (podcast)

Guess who got a TouchPad for $99 this weekend? Everyone. If you weren't lucky enough to snag one early Saturday morning, don't lose hope yet--we expect some online distributors to continue dropping prices for existing stock, not to mention the white 64GB model that just dropped last Friday.

We got plenty of voicemails and video messages from listeners standing in line for the TouchPad, so tune in to hear a couple horror stories from the trenches.

We're also encouraging all 404 listeners to shoot us an e-mail at the404(at)cnet(dot)com with your suggestions, criticisms, and ideas for growing the show. We've always valued our listener input about where you think we should improve, so let us know and we'll try to make it happen.

The 404 Digest for Episode 887

HP's TouchPad fire sale: The fallout. Wilson's Best Buy investigation shows dismal turnout for competing tablets. Arturo gets a touchpad for $99.

Episode 887 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Apple's iPad 2 now shipping in less than a week

Apple's self-described "mother of all backlogs" with regard to iPad 2 supplies appears to have improved, with customers now being able to order one from the company and have it shipped out in less than a week.

Apple has 18 different variations of the tablet, accounting for color, capacity, and wireless networking options. All those variations are now listed on the company's online store as shipping in three to five business days. By comparison, the device is listed as "not available" on Best Buy's and Wal-Mart's online stores, while AT&T'… Read more

The cloud backlash

There's no doubt that the recent "partial failure" of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform is giving enterprises, service providers, and developers pause--and will continue to do so for months to come. Amazon called the outage "partial" and a "degradation," but it was a very big deal. A significant part of Amazon's flagship EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was offline for a day, as were the related EBS (Elastic Block Store) and RDS (Relational Database Service) offerings. The failure affected only the northern Virginia data center ("US-East"), and the majority … Read more

Motorola Xoom priced at whopping $1,199.99?

Is Motorola's Xoom being priced not to sell? That's the question a lot of folks are asking as a tipster pointed Engadget to a listing on Best Buy's Web site, showing the upcoming 10.1-inch tablet priced at $1,199.99, with preorders starting in Best Buy stores on February 17.

Over the last few weeks, some reports suggested the Xoom, which has impressive specs and is the first tablet to run Google's Android 3.0 operating system (Honeycomb), would be priced at $800. But for now, anyway, the Best Buy Web site seems to state … Read more

Network, don't fail me now!

Everything in IT depends on the network.--and not just in an abstract, "need it occasionally" sort of way. The packets must flow for virtually every operation, every job, every transaction. Whenever packets drop, or links go down, we're disconnected and isolated. Information doesn't flow; apps don't work; users don't proceed. We need the network up and running, millisecond by millisecond, every millisecond of every day.

Our utter, urgent dependency won't lessen in the coming years. It will intensify--redoubling and redoubling again. Cisco calls its vision of the future "together." HP … Read more

Nook Color back in stock at bn.com

A few days ago we reported on a rumor that the Nook Color wouldn't be available for two weeks, possibly crimping Valentine's Day sales. Well, while supply at Barnes & Noble's stores remains spotty, with some stores having plenty and others having none, Barnes & Noble has now removed the "ships in two weeks" label from the buy button on its Web site. It's still listed as backordered at BestBuy.com, but it appears that you can now get the Nook Color without delay through BN.com.

Some suggested the delay was due to … Read more

Failure is an option

I recently discussed techniques for reviewing projects to improve their likelihood of success. Underlying this is the reality that projects do fail often, at a greater rate than we'd like to admit.

Some failures are spectacular. After spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of years, nothing ever really works. The entire investment of time, money, energy, effort, and focus has to be completely written off. Those are the legends. The laughing stocks.

But it's a mistake to conflate failures and catastrophes. Most failures are mundane and much smaller scale. They result from changing … Read more