Havana Journal: Salons or Not, Cyberspace Is Still a Distant Place for Most Cubans

Until last month, though, the closest Mr. García, 59, had been to cyberspace was the painfully slow e-mail service at his local post office. Then on June 4, Etecsa, the state telecom company, opened 118 Internet salons around the island, expanding public Web access — by a fraction, at least — in what is regarded as the least wired country in the Western Hemisphere. Mr. García, a retired military officer, immediately signed up.

“This is like a Three Kings’ Day gift,” Mr. García said of his newfound Internet access, referring to the Jan. 6 holiday when people dressed as the Magi hand out goodies to children.

But as gifts go, it is extremely expensive, he said. At $4.50 an hour, a session at one of the new cybersalons costs almost as much as the average state worker earns in a week, prompting many Cubans to wonder whether President Raúl Castro is serious about bringing the Internet to the masses, or just playing for time.

“At this price, hardly anyone is going to be using it,” said Mr. García, who figured he could afford to buy an hour or two a week because his daughter helped him out and he had just sold his house.

Cuba’s limited Internet access is a source of festering resentment among Cubans, millions of whom have never been online. Some people — medics, for example, or journalists — qualify for a dial-up connection at home. Others use pirated connections, rent time on a neighbor’s line or log on at a hotel, where they pay about $8 an hour. Many trade information on memory sticks or rely on stodgy state-run periodicals for news.

“We are living in the back of a cave,” said Walfrido López, a Cuban blogger and information technology specialist. “People here are asleep, because they don’t have information.”

He added, “Having information is what enables you to make decisions, take positions.”

Government figures indicate 26 percent of Cubans had Internet access last year, but this includes millions who entered only an intranet linked to their work. The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency for information and communications technology, puts the number of broadband subscriptions in Cuba at 0.04 per 100 inhabitants, or about one in 2,500. That is lower than in Haiti and Sudan, two places that are not considered the least bit tech-friendly.

Even Cuba’s new cybersalons, which operate under the brand name Nauta, amount to just one for every 95,000 Cubans.

The new service is “a gesture of openness within a context of the ability to have monopoly control,” said Ted Henken, a professor at City University of New York who closely follows the Cuban blogosphere, noting that Etecsa requires users to sign a contract warning that they will be monitored for subversive activity. Still, he added, the government has “created a conversation around access that didn’t exist before.”

Harold Cárdenas Lema, 27, a blogger and philosophy teacher at the University of Matanzas, said the cybersalons represented a “transcendental” shift because they put a relatively fast, fairly uncensored Internet service at the disposal of individuals.

However, the government risks a deep digital divide if it does not cut prices in line with most Cubans’ salaries, Mr. Cárdenas said. And despite an official pledge to prioritize “social” use of the Internet, he and others using university or hospital connections complained they were as slow as ever.

Wilfredo González Vidál, vice minister of communications, in an interview with the official news media in May, assured that “the market will not regulate access to knowledge in our country.” But Rogelio Moreno Díaz responded in his acerbic blog, Bubusópia, that this was “the final insult to the public’s intelligence.”

Pogue's Posts: The HTC One Deserves Its Place in the Spotlight

The Android-based HTC One phone.

Remember HTC? For a long time, this Taiwanese phone maker seemed to be on a roll. Its Android phones kept making gadget headlines.

Then, all of a sudden, Samsung came along, all technological and marketing guns blazing, and that was that. It became an Apple-versus-Samsung world. Everyone sort of forgot about HTC.

Its latest phone, arriving at Sprint and AT&T next week, and T-Mobile shortly thereafter, will give HTC at least a few more weeks in the spotlight. The phone will cost $200 with a two-year contract for the model with 32 gigabytes of memory, $300 for 64 gigs.

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It’s an Android phone — the most beautiful one you’ve ever seen. Seriously. It makes you feel happy and calm just holding this thing in your hands. There’s a picture of the HTC One next to “gorgeous” in the dictionary.

It’s sculptured from a thin, solid block of aluminum, with a gently curved back that adds to that soothing, worry-stone effect. The aluminum grille, above and below the black, black screen, houses the unbelievably powerful, crisp stereo speakers.

The screen is like nothing you’ve ever seen; with 468 pixels crammed into every inch, it’s the sharpest screen ever set into a phone. It’s a bit unnecessary — you stopped being able to detect individual pixels back on the iPhone 4S — but at least you can sleep well at night, satisfied that nobody’s screen is sharper. We’re talking 1080 resolution, the highest HD video there is.

This screen is bright, vivid and huge — 4.7 inches diagonal. A screen that size makes the One much bigger than, say, the iPhone, but not as unwieldy as some Android jumbophones. It weighs a satisfying 5.1 ounces.

The camera is something special. Technically, the resulting photos have 4 megapixels, but HTC correctly points out that megapixel count isn’t everything. The company claims that these are big pixels that soak in more light — and indeed, the low-light pictures from this camera put other phones to shame.

There are some disappointments, though. There’s no memory-card slot, so the built-in storage is all you get. You can’t pop out the battery, either. Battery life is typical 4G LTE Android; you’ll get one day of use on a charge. The usual set of three buttons on an Android phone — Back, Home and Menu — are down to two; HTC has eliminated the Menu button. These buttons are supposed to light up, but they don’t always.

Weirdest of all, HTC once again insists on replacing the mature, polished Android software design, the year-old “Jelly Bean” version, with an interface of its own. This software places, on the first of your Home screens, a series of tiles showing photos and headlines from news sources of your choosing, much like the popular Flipboard app. It’s great, although optional. But in many other areas, HTC didn’t improve Google’s original design.

The phone’s power button doubles, intriguingly enough, as an infrared lens for controlling your TV, but the accompanying app is fairly inelegant. The camera app is not only full-fledged, it may be overly fledged; it offers Still mode, Video mode, and Zoe mode (three-second clips, whose purpose escape me). There’s no physical shutter button.

A crying shame that Verizon is the only carrier holdout; this thing would wipe the floor with its rivals if it had that kind of ubiquitous, superfast LTE network behind it.

Otherwise — wow, is this phone packed. It’s ridiculously fast. Its camera, screen and speakers take first place in smartphones. And hey — did I mention how beautiful it is?

HTC has put all of its 2013 eggs into the One basket, and in general, that was a good call. You could quibble with the software overlays, but it would be hard to imagine a more impressive piece of phone hardware.

Bits Blog: A Place Where Old Computers Go to Live

An I.B.M. computer control panel at the museum was recently outfitted with L.E.D. lights.

SEATTLE — Paul Allen, Microsoft’s other founder, with Bill Gates, has a number of museums. There is the Jimi Hendrix Music Experience and his Flying Heritage Collection. The common theme is “hands on.” You can play a musical instrument and the planes fly.

That is no less true for the Living Computer Museum, a relatively new addition. Housed in a three-story warehouse south of downtown Seattle, its striking feature is that almost all the computers, even those manufactured in the 1960s, actually work.

The showcase machines are legends — like the Digital Equipment Corporation KL-10 introduced in 1974 and esoteric XKL TOAD-1, a clone of the DEC10. (The Digital Equipment meme runs throughout the museum, possibly because these are the computers Mr. Allen grew up programming.)

Opened rather quietly last fall, the museum hasn‘t attracted much publicity. That may be true in part because it appears that the collection has been intended for Mr. Allen and his more technical friends, as much as the general public. Indeed, the showcase computers, housed in a realistic “machine room,” are systems you probably have never heard of — unless you were a computer hacker in the 1960s or 1970s.

One sign that the museum may continue to cater to a rather elite clientele is the party that Mr. Allen held on Tuesday evening to introduce the museum to 150 industry pioneers and a handful of computer journalists — as least those who were writing about computers in the 1970s.

Attendees included pioneers from a number of computing eras: Mr. Gates, of course — the two men posed together, recreating an iconic picture from the 1980s; Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra of Visicalc (the first spreadsheet); Chris Espinosa, who worked with Steve Jobs in the original garage; Larry Tesler, who came to Apple from Xerox PARC to help design the Lisa; Les Ernest, the assistant director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who could arguably be said to have invented the predecessors of both Facebook and Twitter; Lee Felsenstein, the designer of two early personal computers, the SOL and the Osborne 1; Nolan Bushnell of Atari; Esther Dyson, one of the first PC industry impresarios, and her brother George, the computer historian.

Then there was John Draper, known as “Captain Crunch” for discovering an inexpensive method for getting free phone calls by using the whistle from a cereal box. Mr. Draper, who said he is working on his memoirs and now living in Las Vegas, gently teased Mr. Gates, because it was Mr. Draper’s word processor, known as EZ Writer, that I.B.M. chose to offer with the first PC in 1981. Mr. Gates had not yet developed Word.

Mr. Gates said he remembered Mr. Draper, who was indirectly instrumental in creating Apple Computer, by teaching the company’s two founders how to make phone fraud devices known as Blue Boxes. (Mr. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak then sold the devices to raise money to start Apple.)

That Mr. Allen has managed to resurrect so many historic computers is remarkable. He has done it with a relatively small team of seven engineers and a handful of outside consultants. In some cases they have gone to extraordinary lengths to recreate machines where the original instruction manuals have long since vanished.

In other cases they have had to finesse the job, when original parts are no longer available or frequently fail. For example, Keith Perez, the lead restoration engineer for the museum, acknowledged that the beautiful display panel of flashing lights for a vintage IBM 360 now blinked with the aid of a number of LED lights. The originals burned out frequently, even at lower than normal power settings, he said.

At the end of the event, two buses took Mr. Allen’s guests to a downtown hotel for dinner, where engineers swapped tall tales from various computer eras. Before he left for the evening Mr. Allen told the group that when he and Mr. Gates worked for MITS, the maker of the first personal computer, in Albuquerque, he would handle telephone support calls after he finished his day job of writing software.

The computer maker had underpriced the machine at $439, and it was such a hot seller that to lower its costs the company had begun shipping the machine without any internal memory. People would then call to say they had assembled the computer and turned it on and it didn’t work, he recalled. Mr. Allen would then ask them if all the lights on the computer’s front panel were lit. If they were, that meant there was no DRAM (dynamic random access memory) in the computer, known as the Altair.

When he told the callers this, he said, they would invariably ask, “What’s memory?”

Common Sense: At Google, a Place to Work and Play

Yahoo employees should be so lucky.

Whatever else might be said about Yahoo’s workplace, it’s a long way from Google’s, as I discovered this week when I dropped in at Google’s East Coast headquarters, a vast former Port Authority shipping complex that occupies a full city block in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Yahoo set off a nationwide debate about workplace flexibility, productivity and creativity last month after a memo with the directive surfaced on the Internet. “We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together,” read the memo from Jackie Reses, Yahoo’s director of human resources, which went viral after Kara Swisher posted it on AllThingsD.

The discussion may have been all the more heated since the ban was imposed by one of the relatively few female chief executives, one who had a nursery built near the executive suite after she gave birth last year.

Google’s various offices and campuses around the globe reflect the company’s overarching philosophy, which is nothing less than “to create the happiest, most productive workplace in the world,” according to a Google spokesman, Jordan Newman. But do its unorthodox workplaces and lavish perks yield the kind of creativity it prides itself on, and Yahoo obviously hopes to foster?

Mr. Newman, 27, who joined Google straight from Yale, and Brian Welle, a “people analytics” manager who has a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology from New York University, led me on a brisk and, at times, dizzying excursion through a labyrinth of play areas; cafes, coffee bars and open kitchens; sunny outdoor terraces with chaises; gourmet cafeterias that serve free breakfast, lunch and dinner; Broadway-theme conference rooms with velvet drapes; and conversation areas designed to look like vintage subway cars.

The library looks as if Miss Scarlet (from the board game Clue) has just stepped out, leaving her incriminating noose (in the form of a necktie) prominently draped on the back of an oversize wing chair. A bookcase swings open to reveal a secret room and even more private reading area. Next to the recently expanded Lego play station, employees can scurry up a ladder that connects the fourth and fifth floors, where a fiendishly challenging scavenger hunt was in progress. Dogs strolled the corridors alongside their masters, and a cocker spaniel was napping, leashed to a pet rail, outside one of the dining areas.

Google lets many of its hundreds of software engineers, the core of its intellectual capital, design their own desks or work stations out of what resemble oversize Tinker Toys. Some have standing desks, a few even have attached treadmills so they can walk while working. Employees express themselves by scribbling on walls. The result looks a little chaotic, like some kind of high-tech refugee camp, but Google says that’s how the engineers like it.

“We’re trying to push the boundaries of the workplace,” Mr. Newman said, in what seemed an understatement.

In keeping with a company built on information, this seeming spontaneity is anything but. Everything has been researched and is backed by data. In one of the open kitchen areas, Dr. Welle pointed to an array of free food, snacks, candy and beverages. “The healthy choices are front-loaded,” he said. “We’re not trying to be mom and dad. Coercion doesn’t work. The choices are there. But we care about our employees’ health, and our research shows that if people cognitively engage with food, they make better choices.”

So the candy (M&Ms, plain and peanut; TCHO brand luxury chocolate bars, chewing gum, Life Savers) is in opaque ceramic jars that sport prominent nutritional labels. Healthier snacks (almonds, peanuts, dried kiwi and dried banana chips) are in transparent glass jars. In coolers, sodas are concealed behind translucent glass. A variety of waters and juices are immediately visible. “Our research shows that people consume 40 percent more water if that’s the first thing they see,” Dr. Welle said. (Note to Mayor Bloomberg: Perhaps New York City should hide supersize sodas rather than ban them.)

Craig Nevill-Manning, a New Zealand native and Google’s engineering director in Manhattan, was the impetus behind the company’s decision to hire a cadre of engineers in New York, and he led an exodus to Chelsea from what was a small outpost near Times Square. “I lobbied for this building,” he told me. “I love the neighborhood. You can live across the street. There are bars and restaurants.”

The Perfect Place for an Out-of-Work Duke Nukem

The last time we wedged video game characters into films the end result was a list of movies so stupid not even Hollywood would bankroll them. We were just about out of ideas until you guys hit us with so many more suggestions we just had to do it again.

Click on the image if you missed it.

Here goes nothing.

Suggested by A_Different_Nate

This poster reminds us of a puzzle.

Suggested by langstonwells

Koming Soon.

Typical Nintendo; Bogarting all the classics.

Suggested by langstonwells

Get it? We made him red. Cough.

Well, don't you? 10 bucks he's wearing his underwear in the bath.

See? Even a hologram of Duke Nukem gets more tail than regular men.

Suggested by langstonwells

Somebody get on the Source Filmmaker!

Any more ideas? Check out here for the first batch of mash-ups.