Ever needed to test something out but didn’t want to use your own machine? JPC-2 solves that problem by giving you a virtual machine in your browser that’s capable of running Windows XP (with or without Office), Ubuntu 6, and Ubuntu 8. More
After Pioneer decided to shut down its TV business in 2009, Hitachi yesterday announced they are ready to stop producing and outsourcing all production of TVs to makers in Taiwan and other Asian countries. And even though Hitachi said they will continue selling TVs in the future, this sounds very much like a long goodbye.
The move isn’t a big surprise, as it’s notoriously difficult to make money with TVs. Many of the big electronics makers have been struggling to bring their TV business into the black recently, i.e. Sony or market leader Samsung (Hitachi expects to lose money on that segment in the current fiscal year, too).
The company has just one flat panel production plant left in Japan, which it plans to close by year-end, according to reports in Japanese media.
It’s good timing to drop out of the TV business, five months after the March 11 earthquake in Japan (which hurt Hitachi’s sales), the switch in Japan from analog to digital TV broadcasting two weeks ago (which triggered a massive demand for new TVs that’s now ending), and five days after the company announced a 97% year-on-year drop in net profit for the quarter through June.
Read more here:
Hitachi To Stop Producing TVs By Year-End
Arduino, meet .NET Gadgeteer — your newest homebrew hacking rival. Born from Microsoft Research engineers’ desire to build prototypes quickly and easily, the two-and-a-half-years in the making ARM7-powered mainboard packs 4MB Flash, 16MB RAM, Ethernet, WiFi, an SD card interface and USB ports. Novice mods might wanna put the Netduino down because this homespun alternative also runs atop MS' .NET Micro Framework, and thanks to its IntelliSense feature, makes auto-coding a breeze for first-timers. If you're interested in what Ballmer & co. are offering, you can head to the project's site now to pre-order its GHI-made hardware: a $250 Spider Starter Kit and the $120 Spider Mainboard. Both will be available by the end of September, but if you need a preview of what this burgeoning open source community has to offer, peep the stop-motion making mod after the break.
Microsoft Research’s .NET Gadgeteer steps out into the light, shoots daggers at Arduino (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 22:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Kids these days, what with their “Internets” and doing the Twitters and whatnot. Why, you can send perfectly good long-distance messages with a teletype machine! That’s what a fellow named Mdziewie did. He rigged a 1963 model teletype printer to accept and transmit text messages. The site is in Polish, but Google Translate will give you a sense of how he wrote the software and modified a modem. You can watch a video of the machine at the link. Link (Google Translate) -via Geekosystem
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Teletype Printer Adapted to Send and Receive Text Messages
gumbi west writes “One Wall Street analyst predicts what slashdot commenters have predicted for years, that iOS and OS X will merge into a single OS. However the analyst sees this happening because the iOS devices receive a substantial CPU boost from the quad core A6 which can power MBA and smaller devices while following 64-bit ARM processors can bring the remainder of the Apple lineup back to ARM under a single architecture.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Wall Street Predicts Merge of OS X and iOS
An anonymous reader writes “At the end of July 2011, Microsoft can say that Windows XP finally fell below the 50 percent mark. In other words, Redmond’s decade-old operating system is now used by less than half of all Internet users.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Windows XP Market Share Finally Falls Below 50%
Fan of ASUS’ affordable, yet competitively specced Eee Pad Transformer, but still haven’t committed your credit to its 10.1-inches? Well, if this bout of rumor-mongering proves true, you might want to put the wallet down until early fall. Harbinger of supply chain gossip Digitimes is reporting that the electronics maker has just enlisted Wintek to provide touch panels for its next gen tablet, slated to launch this October. The parts supplier is said to be working in tandem with HannStar Display to ramp up production should this iteration be met with its predecessor’s unforeseen popularity. Adding more ambiguity to the speculative fire, ASUS’ Chairman Jonney Shih recently confirmed to Forbes that an updated Transformer is on its way, saying only that it’d be very “impressive,” and would be available before CES. Jonney didn’t comment on the upcoming slate’s supposed use of NVIDIA’s quad-core Kal-El, but with the chip’s promised August launch date, we wouldn’t rule it out. While talks of a Transformer 2 are still just gossamer promise, you can always snag that Eee Pad Slider while you sit and wait.
ASUS’ next gen Eee Pad Transformer to pack NVIDIA’s quad-core Kal-El, launch this October? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Jeff tells us about his exciting new site: StreamIt.tv and how it is different from other Streaming Video Platforms.