Items tagged with ants
Yahoo is an interesting entity. It has an enormous Internet presence, of course; 500 million visitors a month. But Yahoo seems like an audience without a show from time to time. Its share price has declined precipitously, losing half its value in the last two years; Google is killing them at Internet search; and social networking sites drag Yahoo's users off to hang out in their virtual worlds. How will Yahoo compete? By laying people off, for starters.During the weekend, some blogs reported that Yahoo was considering layoffs of 10 to 20 percent of its work force. But the people close to the company, who discussed Yahoo’s layoff plans on condition that they not be identified, said the cuts would...
Read more...
Well, not exactly. But IBM is claiming that Taiwan-based Asus is infringing on several of their patents, and wants the United States International Trade Commission to ban the import of Asus Computer products into the US until they get their pound of patent flesh. This could get very interesting, because Asus makes computers under their own name, but also makes computers for other big brand names such as Apple and Dell.IBM said the infringing products include notebook computers, servers, routers, and some components. It said the patents cover important aspects of computer systems, including power supplies, computer-cooling and computer-clustering capabilities.Asustek has been trying to establish...
Read more...
Apparently the Manhunt 2 controversy isn't over quite yet, and with presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton throwing herself into the fray, it isn't likely to end anytime soon. What is Hillary planning on this time? A review of the ESRB.For those who haven't been following the situation, here's a recap:“Last June, three European countries banned the vidgame, and the board (ESRB) slapped it with the AO rating for the same reason: a high level of violence. Blighty officials said "Manhunt 2" was unacceptable because of an "unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone" that constantly "encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing."Publisher Rockstar Games...
Read more...
Well, not exactly. But a technology developed by British boffins to protect soldiers from chemical attack, called "ion-mask," has been released for civilian use to P2i in Oxfordshire, England. It's poised to become the method of choice for protecting electronic devices of all kinds from exposure to water. It doesn't rely on elaborate gaskets to keep moisture out of the case of a protected device. The entire device, including moving parts and circuit boards, can be coated and protected with the marvelous material. Invisible to the naked eye, ion-mask causes water to bounce off treated surfaces like beads of mercury by decreasing the surface energy of the component materials, and, by applying a...
Read more...
File this under: Nifty. A doctor working on a pneumatic vest used to remotely prod patients and allow diagnoses to be made over the internet hit on the idea of using the vest to simulate video game damage being inflicted on the player.A vest designed by doctor Mark Ombrellaro uses air pressure and feedback from computer games to deliver pneumatic thumps to the spots on players' torsos where they would have been struck were they actually on the battlefields.The "3rd Space" vest will make its US debut in November at a price of 189 dollars. It will be launched with the first-person shooter game "Call of Duty" and a custom-made title.They are working on adapting the vest to simulate g-force, and...
Read more...
Video game behemoth Electronic Arts just got a little bigger. They've acquired two software studios, BioWare and Pandemic, for an industry record breaking $860 million. Although Electronic Arts is the number one video game publisher in the world, their offerings in the first person shooter/ role playing/action genre are a little thin. These acquisitions should fix that.Prior to this deal, EA's largest acquisition was its $680 million purchase of mobile game publisher Jamdat Mobile Inc. in 2006. BioWare and Pandemic have a total of 10 games under development. Together, they employ about 800 people in Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, as well as in Canada and Australia. Microsoft...
Read more...
The wi-fi coverage plans that several U.S. cities have been entertaining have taken hits of late with the woes of Earthlink. Meanwhile, in the U.K., a partnership between BT Group and FON has opened up a huge number of additional hotspots in that country. Now McDonald's has announced plans to add themselves to the mix.Fast food chain McDonald's said on Saturday it would offer free wireless Internet access across its 1,200-strong restaurants in the UK, making it the country's biggest provider of free wireless broadband access.McDonald's, let's (ahem) not forget what country you got your start in when considering free wi-fi, eh?...
Read more...
Google didn't want Microsoft's ubiquitous PowerPoint presentations to be the only way to put people to sleep in a business meeting, so they've come out with their own version of the slide software they call Presentation. "The new program will be included in Google's free software bundle, called "Docs," which users must be online to employ. And the company will sell a souped-up version to businesses, universities and government agencies for $50 a year per user. As PowerPoint does, Google's presentation software enables users to create a series of slides with a mixture of text and graphics on each. PowerPoint is widely used in business meetings." Google:...
Read more...
Colbert and Stewart on the other side of the desk? In other words, being interviewed instead of interviewing someone? That will be what happens if Google gets its way. Google wants to depose the two of them, in addition to at least 30 other witnesses, in testimony pertaining to the Viacom lawsuit leveled against Google and YouTube. The two comedians are apparently being dragged into the copyright fight between their employer and Google. Entertainment conglomerate Viacom, the company behind Stewart's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report filed a lawsuit against Google last year, alleging that Google and YouTube encourages users to pirate copyright material. Trying to get a straight...
Read more...
As we reported earlier, technical difficulties at a transformer substation caused Korean memory factories owned by Samsung to go shut down until the situation could be resolved. It seems that issues have now been resolved and the plants running again are ramping up to full production as quickly as they can.The outage has come a particularly bad time for companies that make hybrid drives, solid state drives, and of course, MP3 players. Increasing demand and off-line factories mean higher priced products for consumers, at least in the short-term. “Samsung said all six lines were fully operating by 12:00 p.m. (11:00 p.m. EDT), earlier than expected. Samsung previously said full operation would...
Read more...
The United Kingdom plans to make its PCs go green after the realization that PCs across the globe contribute significantly to carbon buildup in the atmosphere. As a result a task force named "Green Shift" has been created in the city of Manchester with the goal of reducing computer energy use in the UK by 98 percent. Green Shift will offer environmentally friendly services such as hosting e-mail, office applications, and web surfing on data centers to consolidate the jobs of individual PCs. Local Government Minister Phil Woolas described cyber-warming is a "massive issue". He said the taskforce was the first of its kind in the world and a sign of how serious the UK is about tackling this threat...
Read more...
Adobe announced yesterday at the national Association of Broadcasters trade show that they've got a new flash based platform that lets you download and watch videos on or off-line. The content providers are supposed to like this better as they can send along whatever they've been using to make money on the content with the video. Delivered as a lightweight download, Adobe Media Player delivers innovation for both viewers and content owners. For viewers, Adobe Media Player enables higher quality Flash format playback, the ability to download and view videos offline, ways to discover interesting new shows, full screen playback, one-click viewer ratings, and a powerful Favorites...
Read more...
Pay attention class, there will be an exam at the end of the lesson. Presently the portable hard drives top out at 120GB and grow 40% larger every year. This means that the mighty Seagate 750GB drives of today will fit in your pocket in just under 6 years, and the TB barrier will be broken wide open in 7. That is, if the math holds. With flash solid-state drives being the hip new thing, the 1.8" mechanical drives may or may not be so fashionable by then. "The Seagate rep just got back to me after doing the math. He told me there's a Seagate slide that "shows a 2.5-inch drive (the ones used in laptops) reaching 1TB by 2013. Using that calculation...
Read more...
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they sure pick out big game to hunt. Now they've announced they want to kill the JPEG format, using their HD Photo format. That's like replacing running water at this point. Microsoft claims that "this new, next-generation digital image format offers the best solution for digital image editing and storage and unlocks the potential for digital photography on devices, applications and services." The company promises a compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG, with fewer damaging artifacts, resulting in higher-quality images that are one-half the file size. In addition, HD Photo is described...
Read more...
