Tech Today w/ Ken May

When you’re producing chips for the iPad and iPhone, you need a serious facility to meet those demands. And evidently, Samsung’s not foreseeing its legal battles with Apple to cause any wrinkles in said plans. In fact, Bloomberg is reporting that Sammy has “sent requests for proposals to banks to borrow as much as $1 billion to expand production capacity at its factory in Austin, Texas,” with the bonds to be issued by Samsung’s US unit. It’s bruited that the company — which has around $19.2 billion in cash — may sell its first overseas bonds since 1997 due to the impossibly low cost of borrowing money these days, and in a time where positive economic news is tough to come by, it’s quite the relief to see a bit of forward progress come from historically low interest rates. Reuters is reporting that the investment will mostly be used to “boost production of mobile chips and next-generation OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display panels,” but specific details beyond that remain murky.

Samsung looks to borrow $1 billion to expand production capacity in Austin, Texas originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung looks to borrow $1 billion to expand production capacity in Austin, Texas

ScummVM was born on September 17, 2001, at 5:57pm GMT+1. The program was meant as an interpreter that could play classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games such as Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Day of the Tentacle in a virtual machine (VM).

As for the name, “SCUMM” was the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” itself a reference to the first LucasArts game that relied on the company’s proprietary game design tool. Expanded and revised through the years, SCUMM helped LucasArs build a huge line of popular adventure games in the 1980s and 1990s, but the DOS-based games became increasingly difficult to play on modern systems.

ScummVM addressed this problem. Little did its earliest developers know, however, that it would grow far beyond its origins, taking on a life of its own as more than 100 people contributed a million lines of code over the next decade. Today, ScummVM has become almost a general-purpose adventure game interpreter that can run on nearly any architecture. How did an ever-changing group of volunteers manage to do it—and avoid being sued out of existence?

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Feature: Maniac Tentacle Mindbenders: How ScummVM’s unpaid coders kept adventure gaming alive

Last Saturday, a hacking group calling itself “The Lords of Dharmaraja” claimed that it had obtained the confidential source code of Norton AntiVirus and that it would release the full code on Tuesday. Wait, that’s tomorrow. More »

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Hackers Threaten to Dump Norton AntiVirus Source Code Tomorrow [Hackers]

angry tapir writes “China’s Internet population passed the half billion mark at the end of 2011 after the country added 28 million new users during the second half of the year. At the end of December, the country had 513 million Internet users, according to a report issued Monday by the China Internet Network Information Center. The number of users accessing the Internet from their mobile phones has also grown, reaching 355 million — more than the entire population of the U.S.”

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China Internet Users Hit Half a Billion

We always enjoy a useful infographic, and there are few things quite as important as choosing a strong password—at least in the area of online security. If you’re looking to beef up your passwords, here are plenty of great tips consolidated into one great image. More »

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Use This Infographic to Pick a Good, Strong Password [Password Security]

If you’re a clumsy, phone-dropping fool, you either have a very scratched phone or a very scratched phone case. But this scratch-proof case from Nissan (yes, that Nissan) saves the klutzes of this world from their fumbling. More »

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Self-Healing iPhone Cases Could Save Your Clumsy Ass [Phones]

An anonymous reader writes “In a surprise move, Representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, effectively killing the bill. This move was most likely due to the huge online protest and the White House threatening to veto the bill if it had passed. But don’t celebrate yet. PIPA (the Senate’s version of SOPA) is still up for consideration.”

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House Kills SOPA

kkleiner writes “Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston have collaborated to create a robot that can swim through the intestines. The size of a large pill, the ‘microswimmer’ is powered by the strong magnetic fields generated by an MRI machine. A tail measuring 20mm x 5mm made of copper and flexible polymer vibrates due to the magnets and propels the little microrobot through the gut.”

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MRI Powered Pill-Sized Robot Swims Through Intestines

Six months after the launch of Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), Apple’s major overhaul to its professional video editing software Final Cut Pro, video pros find themselves increasingly looking at other software options. The new version of Final Cut Pro was controversial—there were significant changes to the Final Cut interface, a plethora of editing features were taken away, and worst of all, Final Cut Pro X was rendered unable to import projects from previous versions of the software. For video editors and producers with years of work using Final Cut Pro, the launch of Final Cut Pro X made it seem like Apple no longer cared for its market of creative professionals.

Is that still the case now, half a year later? TV production company Bunim/Murray recently brought the issue back into the public consciousness by announcing that it was switching from Final Cut Pro to Avid, noting that the company needed “a partner who would understand our long-term needs.”

As it turns out, the reaction to Bunim/Murray’s announcement from creative pros was, “took them long enough.” We spoke to a handful of professionals who work in the video production industry to see how they’re feeling now that the dust has settled, and the general consensus appears to be “not good.”

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Why the video pros are moving away from Apple

Inspired, perhaps, by the fruits of Ben Heck’s dual-console handheld dreams, Retrobit has retrofit their Retroduo NES / SNES hybrid game console to fit in your hand. The Retroduo Portable, a handheld SNES console shown for the first time at CES 2012, hopes to one-up Hyperkin’s SupaBoy by adding support for classic NES games. We dropped by their booth to get a closer look.

Continue reading Retrobit RetroDuo portable and RetroPort hands-on

Retrobit RetroDuo portable and RetroPort hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Retrobit RetroDuo portable and RetroPort hands-on