Billly Gates writes “AMD may have trouble in their CPU department with Intel having superior fabrication plants. However, in the graphics market with GPU chips AMD is doing well. AMD earned a very rare Elite reward from Tomshardware as the fastest GPU available with its fastest r9 for as little as $550 each. NVidia has its top end GPU cards going for $1, 000 as it had little competition to worry about. Maximum PC also included some benchmarks and crowned ATI as the fastest and best value card available. AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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An anonymous “US intelligence source” told a German newspaper that Obama had been briefed on the fact that the NSA had tapped German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone in 2010, and that he’d personally let it go. Expect a lot more of this, as spooks who are sick of being kicked around for conducting the spying that high-ranking administration officials had been delighted to green-light start to whisper the names of their collaborators in government. Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying that National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010. “Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,” the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying. News weekly Der Spiegel reported that leaked NSA documents showed that Merkel’s phone had appeared on a list of spying targets since 2002, and was still under surveillance shortly before Obama visited Berlin in June. Obama aware of Merkel spying since 2010: German media [Deborah Cole/AFP] ( via /. ) 
On Thursday, Zynga released its third quarter results and showed a loss of only $68,000—far better than the embattled gaming company’s losses of $52 million this time last year. And, because that loss was small, beating Zynga’s own expectations for Q3, its shares got a 12 percent boost in after-hours trading on Wall Street, Thursday evening. Still, that modicum of good news is just a sugar coat on an otherwise dismal earnings statement. Zynga’s Q3 revenue was only $203 million, which constitutes a decrease of 36 percent year-over-year, and a decrease of 12 percent from the quarter before. Also, Daily and Monthly Active Users were both down for Zynga. The company lost almost a quarter of its Daily Active Users compared to Q2 2013 (and that statistic is becoming a bit of a trend: we saw that exact headline on last quarter’s earnings report, too). And Zynga lost nearly 30 percent of its Monthly Active Users from Q2 2013. From Q3 2012, the statistics were down 49 percent and 57 percent, respectively. But it looks like Zynga will be progressing conservatively from here. For the fourth quarter of 2013, the company projected revenue in the range of $175 million to $185 million (a substantial decrease from this quarter’s earnings) and a net loss in the range of $31 million to $21 million. After a summer in which the company laid off 18 percent of its workforce and shuttered Omgpop , a games company it acquired for $200 million, Zynga’s next few months will be watched carefully to see how (and whether) the company will weather 2014. Read on Ars Technica | Comments