Author: kenmay

Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phone Arena: On Tuesday, Apple is expected to report its fiscal second quarter earnings. In that report, the tech titan will reportedly announce that it is holding $250 billion in cash. If you think that this is a lot of money, you’re absolutely right. According to Marketwatch.com, this is more than the foreign currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined. Looking at it another way, at current valuations Apple could purchase all of the outstanding shares of Walmart and Procter & Gamble and still have money left over. It has taken Apple only 4 and half years to double its cash hoard. During the fiscal first quarter of 2017, Apple was adding $3.6 million to its cash position every hour. It finished the quarter ending in December with $246.09 billion in cash. 90% of the money is banked overseas, which means that Apple would be one of the companies to benefit the most from President Trump’s plan to offer a one time tax break on repatriated funds. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas

Intel patches remote code-execution bug that lurked in CPUs for 10 years

Enlarge (credit: Intel ) Remote management features that have shipped with Intel processors for almost a decade contain a critical flaw that gives attackers full control over the computers that run on vulnerable networks. That’s according to an an advisory published Monday afternoon by Intel. Intel has released a patch for the vulnerability, which resides in the chipmaker’s Active Management Technology, Intel Small Business Technology, and Intel Standard Manageability. Business customers who buy computers running vPro processors use those services to remotely administer large fleets of computers. The bug doesn’t affect chips running on consumer PCs. The chipmaker has rated the vulnerability critical and is recommending vulnerable customers install a firmware patch. In the company’s Monday post, Intel officials wrote: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel patches remote code-execution bug that lurked in CPUs for 10 years

Is this Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop?

Tomorrow Microsoft is holding its #MicrosoftEDU event where we expect to find out how it will take on Google’s Chrome OS, but some of the news may have already leaked. Notorious Microsoft watcher @h0x0d tweeted out a few images of a slim 13.5-inch laptop that apparently runs Windows 10 S — a cloud-optimized version of Windows that only access apps from the Store — has a PixelSense display, comes in four colors and features an Alcantara-covered keyboard. We’ve seen that material on a Surface Pro 4 keyboard before, and the other specs line up from the Chromebook fighter we’re expecting. Interestingly, it also only has a few ports visible. Developing… Surface Laptop: 13.5-in PixelSense display, 4 colors (Platinum/Burgundy/Cobalt Blue/Graphite Gold), Alcantara-covered keyboard, Windows 10 S pic.twitter.com/AEAAhYPgQN — WalkingCat (@h0x0d) May 2, 2017 Surface Laptop: 360 view pic.twitter.com/b5ENVcCIzI — WalkingCat (@h0x0d) May 2, 2017 well Surface Laptop has only these ports, doen’t look ….. right…. to me pic.twitter.com/8fN7JwOYsa — WalkingCat (@h0x0d) May 2, 2017 Source: WalkingCat (Twitter)

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Is this Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop?

India Aims To Make Every Car Electric By 2030 In Bid To Tackle Pollution

India’s energy minister has unveiled plans for every car sold in the country to be powered by electricity by the year 2030. “The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles, ” reports The Independent. From the report: âoeWe are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way, ” coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi. “We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient… The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country.” Mr Goyal said the electric car industry would need between two and three years of government assistance, but added that he expected the production of the vehicles to be “driven by demand and not subsidy” after that. “The cost of electric vehicles will start to pay for itself for consumers, ” he said according to the International Business Times. “We would love to see the electric vehicle industry run on its own, ” he added. An investigation by Greenpeace this year found that as many as 2.3 million deaths occur every year due to air pollution in the country. The report, entitled “Airpocalypse, ” claimed air pollution had become a “public health and economic crisis” for Indians. It said the number of deaths caused by air pollution was only “a fraction less” than the number of deaths from tobacco use, adding that 3 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was lost to the levels of toxic smog. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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India Aims To Make Every Car Electric By 2030 In Bid To Tackle Pollution

LG’s latest 4K monitor puts four displays in one 42.5-inch panel

LG’s Apple-flagship 5K monitor may have stumbled on its release , but the company’s newest display looks like it’ll cover all the bases in terms of sheer flexibility and screen real estate. The LG 43UD79-B, as it’s cleverly called, is a 42.5-inch UHD panel with a 3840 × 2160 resolution, plus a nice range of gaming and productivity-focused features. On it’s face, the 43UD79-B is an IPS panel with 1000:1 contrast ratio, wide 178-degree viewing angle and support for over 1.07 billion colors. Although its 60 Hz refresh rate won’t quite stack up against the latest gaming monitors, according to a press release from LG the 43UD79-B does boast a Game Mode, Black Stabilizer and Dynamic Action Sync mode. For gamers with Radeon GPUs , compatibility with AMD’s FreeSync dynamic refresh rate technology will also prevent screen tearing and visual stutters. Around back, you’ll find two HDMI 2.0 inputs, two HDMI 1.4 inputs, one DisplayPort 1.2a port with FreeSync and a USC-C port that can also handle a DisplayPort signal. With all those ports, the monitor can act as a screen for up to four different devices simultaneously, using a variety of split-screen configurations and picture-in-picture support. Using the two standard USB 3.0 ports, the monitor can also control two computers from a single mouse and keyboard. Finally, with two built-in Harman Kardon speakers and an included remote control, the panel could easily double as a 42.5-inch 4K TV once all the spreadsheets are closed. According to AnandTech , the 43UD79-B goes on sale in Japan on May 19th for about 83, 000 Yen (or about $745 US), but pre-order pages have started showing up stateside for a hair under $700 .

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LG’s latest 4K monitor puts four displays in one 42.5-inch panel

Linux Kernel 4.11 Officially Released

prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Linux kernel 4.11 has been in development for the past two months, since very early March, when the first Release Candidate arrived for public testing. Eight RCs later, we’re now able to download and compile the final release of Linux 4.11 on our favorite GNU/Linux distributions and enjoy its new features. Prominent ones include scalable swapping for SSDs, a brand new perf ftrace tool, support for OPAL drives, support for the SMC-R (Shared Memory Communications-RDMA) protocol, journalling support for MD RAID5, all new statx() system call to replace stat(2), and persistent scrollback buffers for VGA consoles… The Linux 4.11 kernel also introduces initial support for Intel Gemini Lake chips, which is an Atom-based, low-cost computer processor family developed using Intel’s 14-nanometer technology, and better power management for AMD Radeon GPUs when the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver is used. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.11 Officially Released

As Print Surges, Ebook Sales Plunge Nearly 20%

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children’s books surged 16%. The same trend is on display in the U.S., where ebook sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%… Sales of e-readers declined by more than 40% between 2011 and 2016, according to consumer research group Euromonitor International. “E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiraled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets, ” Euromonitor said in a research note. The article includes an even more interesting statistic: that one-third of adults tried a “digital detox” in 2016, limiting their personal use of electronics. Are any Slashdot readers trying to limit their own screen time — or reading fewer ebooks? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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As Print Surges, Ebook Sales Plunge Nearly 20%

The Primitive Technology guy builds a water-powered hammer

The fellow in Australia, who makes tools and shelters from his bare hands and natural materials, is back with a new video. This time, he made water-powered hammer. It’s basically a log (hollowed out by fire) that pivots up and down when it receives and empties water from a stream. This is the first machine I’ve built using primitive technology that produces work without human effort. Falling water replaces human calories to perform a repetitive task. A permanent set up usually has a shed protecting the hammer and materials from the weather while the trough end sits outside under the spout. This type of hammer is used to pulverise grain into flour and I thought I might use one to mill dry cassava chips into flour when the garden matures. This device has also been used to crush clay for porcelain production. A stone head might make it useful as a stamp mill for crushing ores to powder. It might pulp fibres for paper even.

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The Primitive Technology guy builds a water-powered hammer

Encrypted WhatsApp Message Recovered From Westminster Terrorist’s Phone

Bruce66423 brings word that a terrorist’s WhatsApp message has been decrypted “using techniques that ‘cannot be disclosed for security reasons’, though ‘sources said they now have the technical expertise to repeat the process in future.'” The Economic Times reports: U.K. security services have managed to decode the last message sent out by Khalid Masood before he rammed his high-speed car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed to death a police officer at the gates of Parliament on March 22. The access to Masood’s message was achieved by what has been described by security sources as a use of “human and technical intelligence”… The issue of WhatsApp’s encrypted service, which is closed to anyone besides the sender and recipient, had come under criticism soon after the attack. “It’s completely unacceptable. There should be no place for terrorists to hide. We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other, ” U.K. home secretary Amber Rudd had said. Security sources say the message showed the victim’s motive was military action in Muslim countries, while the article adds that though ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, “no evidence has emerged to back this up.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Encrypted WhatsApp Message Recovered From Westminster Terrorist’s Phone