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Former McDonald’s USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour

An anonymous reader shares an article on Fox Business: As fast-food workers across the country vie for $15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture. “I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry — it’s cheaper to buy a $35, 000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour (warning: autoplaying video) bagging French fries — it’s nonsense and it’s very destructive and it’s inflationary and it’s going to cause a job loss across this country like you’re not going to believe, ” said former McDonald’s USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network’s Mornings with Maria. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014. These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Former McDonald’s USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour

Smartphone maker Foxconn replaces 60,000 workers with robots

A Chinese government official told the South China Morning Post that a Foxconn factory has “reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots. It has tasted success in reduction of labour costs. More companies are likely to follow suit.” As many as 600 major companies in Kunshan have similar plans, according to a government survey. The job cuts do not augur well for Kunshan, which had a population of more than 2.5 million at the end of 2014, two-thirds of whom were migrant workers.

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Smartphone maker Foxconn replaces 60,000 workers with robots

HP splits again, as Hewlett Packard Enterprise spins off IT services

In 2014, Hewlett-Packard announced that it was splitting into two separate companies: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, selling servers and enterprise services, and HP Inc, selling PCs and printers. That split completed last year at the cost of more than 30,000 jobs . In a surprise announcement today, the company is about to embark on a second split: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is spinning off its IT services business. The low-margin outsourced IT services business, which HP got into with its $14 billion acquisition of EDS in 2008, is to be merged with Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) to create a new company currently known only as SpinCo. HPE will own half of the new company, HPE CEO Meg Whitman will be on the new company’s board, and HPE and CSC will each nominate half of the board members. CSC’s current CEO, Mike Lawrie, will become CEO of the new company. HPE says that the deal will save around $1 billion in operating costs. HPE shareholders will own shares in both companies, owning half of the combined company, with their stake valued at around $4.5 billion. They’ll also receive a $1.5 billion cash dividend. Additionally, the merger will see some $2.5 billion in debt moved to SpinCo’s books. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HP splits again, as Hewlett Packard Enterprise spins off IT services

Intel’s quad-core “Skull Canyon” NUC is a workstation for the size-obsessed

Andrew Cunningham Intel’s quad-core “Skull Canyon” NUC. 10 more images in gallery Every year when Intel refreshes its NUC mini PCs, it releases more models meant to cover a wider range of needs. There are cheap fanless NUCs, NUCs that can fit in full-size hard drives, and mainstream NUCs that are essentially little Ultrabooks inside boxes. This year is the first where Intel has tried to release a quad-core workstation-class NUC itself instead of leaving that field to OEM partners . This PC, also known as “Skull Canyon” because of Intel’s history of using skulls to promote performance-focused products, is quite a bit different from the other NUCs. It needs more space for cooling, so it’s around twice as wide as standard NUCs (though it’s a little shorter). But with that increased size comes a lot more flexibility and performance. Pricing and building Like other NUCs, the Skull Canyon version is sold as a “PC kit,” which means you have to add your own RAM, SSD, and operating system before you can actually use the thing. Assuming you want to equip it with fast PCI Express SSDs and a healthy amount of RAM, you’ll end up spending near $1,000—around $650 for the NUC itself, another $180 or so for a 256GB Samsung 950, $60-ish for 16GB of DDR4 RAM (Skylake supports up to 64GB), and $100 for your Windows 10 license if that’s the operating system you prefer to use. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s quad-core “Skull Canyon” NUC is a workstation for the size-obsessed

Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year

Danny Sullivan, reporting for Search Engine Land: How many searches per year happen on Google? After nearly four years, the company has finally released an updated figure today of “trillions” per year. How many trillions, exactly, Google wouldn’t say. Consider two trillion the starting point. Google did confirm to Search Engine Land that because it said it handles “trillions” of searches per year worldwide, the figure could be safely assumed to be two trillion or above. Is it more than two trillion? Google could be doing five trillion searches per year. Or 10 trillion. Or 100 trillion. Or presumably up to 999 trillion, because if it were 1, 000 trillion, you’d expect Google would announce that it does a quadrillion searches per year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year

E Ink announces a color breakthrough, but it’s only for signs

There’s a small glimmer of hope for the seemingly doomed dream of color electronic paper . E Ink, which helped pioneer ePaper by providing the technology for Amazon’s Kindle, announced today that it’s finally developed a display that can show up to 32, 000 colors. Dubbed Advanced Color ePaper (ACeP), it’s a huge leap above the company’s aging Triton tech , which could only display around 4, 000 colors. Basically, it’ll be clear enough to be practically indistinguishable from color printed onto real paper. But don’t get your hopes up for an e-reader with ACeP just yet — for now, E Ink is positioning it for in-store signage as 20-inch panels. While it’s just as low-power as you’d expect, ACeP isn’t as sharp as E Ink’s black and white technology yet, which can reach up to 300 pixels per inch. ACeP only has a resolution of 1600 x 2500 pixels, which clocks in at 150ppi. It also takes a full two seconds for the display to refresh. Still, ACeP is a significant move for E Ink, which for years has been struggling to develop color displays that can go against increasingly sharp OLED and LCD screens. With Qualcomm’s Mirasol technology floundering, ACeP could end up being the color ePaper solution we’ve been waiting for. Source: E Ink (PR)

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E Ink announces a color breakthrough, but it’s only for signs

5 Hidden Windows 10 Features You Should Use

Windows 10 has officially been with us for close to a year now , but even if you’ve spent a lot of time with the OS since its launch, you may not have found everything it has to offer. Here are five of our favorite hidden features that we’ve discovered over the course of the last year, and why you might want to start using of them. Read more…

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5 Hidden Windows 10 Features You Should Use

AT&T’s data caps impose harshest punishments on DSL users

(credit: Mike Mozart ) AT&T’s home Internet data caps got an overhaul yesterday when the company implemented a recently announced plan to strictly enforce the caps and collect overage fees from more customers. Customers stuck on AT&T’s older DSL architecture will be facing lower caps and potentially higher overage fees than customers with more modern Internet service. AT&T put a positive spin on the changes when it  announced them in March , saying that it was increasing the monthly data limits imposed on most home Internet customers. This was technically true as AT&T already had caps for most Internet users. But previously, the caps were only enforced in DSL areas, so the limits had no financial impact on most customers. Now, a huge swath of AT&T customers have effectively gone from unlimited plans to ones that are capped, with an extra $10 charge for each additional 50GB of data provided per month. The only customers who aren’t getting an increase in their monthly data allowance are the ones who have been dealing with caps the past few years, according to AT&T’s data usage website : Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T’s data caps impose harshest punishments on DSL users

World’s first 3D-printed office opens in Dubai

The world’s first 3D-printed office building opened this week in Dubai , Reuters reports. The 2, 700-square-foot, single-story building was built in just 17 days using a gigantic, 20-foot tall 3D printer and a special mix of concrete, fiber reinforced plastic and glass fiber reinforced gypsum. Although the “printer” was massive at about two stories tall, 120 feet long and 40 feet wide, it only needed one staffer to make sure it was functioning properly. The rest of the 18-person construction crew consisted of installers, electricians and mechanical engineers who completed the job for a mere $140, 000 in construction and labor costs — or about half the price of a comparable structure built with conventional methods. Of course, the building is more than just another gold star in the UAE’s ultramodern playland — it will also serve, appropriately enough, as the temporary headquarters for the Dubai Future Foundation. Next year, the structure is scheduled to become the home of Dubai’s Museum of the Future . “This is the first 3D-printed building in the world, and it’s not just a building, it has fully functional offices and staff, ” the UAE Minister of Cabinet Affairs, Mohamed Al Gergawi said. According to Gergawi, Dubai plans to have 25 percent of the buildings in the emirate built via 3D printing by the year 2030.

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World’s first 3D-printed office opens in Dubai

1.5 billion-year-old fossils reveal organisms of unusual size

Just a couple of 1.56 billion-year-old fossils from southern China. (credit: Maoyan Zhu) The Cambrian “explosion” of life around 540 million years ago is one heck of a story, in which a huge variety of animal body plans first appear in the fossil record. But the harder we look, the more interesting and incredible the Cambrian prequels become. Now, there’s a report of organisms big enough to be easily visible yet dating back to more than 1.5 billion years ago. The fuse to the Cambrian bomb was quite long and, at the very least, had some firecrackers tied to it. Single-celled eukaryotes, organisms with a nucleus and other complex internal structures, joined the bacteria and archaea around 1.5 billion years before the Cambrian. About 60 million years before the start of the Cambrian, a considerable batch of complex organisms appeared, although their relationships to Cambrian life are contentious. The history of multi-cellular eukaryotes in between is hard to piece together, as extraordinary luck is needed to preserve evidence of their soft cell bodies for us to find. We have a couple examples of tiny multi-cellular organisms that may have been eukaryotes, but a new discovery from a team led by Shixing Zhu of the China Geological survey adds a big one to the family. The long, flat fossils they found in 1.56 billion-year-old rocks were up to a whopping 30 centimeters long and 8 centimeters wide. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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1.5 billion-year-old fossils reveal organisms of unusual size