AMD’s market share tiptoes higher, Intel still ruler of the roost

Intel may still be king of the microprocessing hill, but from the looks of IDC’s latest market report, scrappy underdog AMD is starting to claim more of the $9.5 billion dollar pie. The semiconductor stalwarts faced off in four separate market categories with runner-up AMD seeing gains in all, save for servers where its paltry 5.5 percent share dropped 0.6 percent versus Intel’s commanding 94.5 percent lead. The Q2 2011 report pegged Intel’s overall worldwide share at 79.3 percent, a 1.5 percent decrease from the previous quarter, while AMD saw a 1.5 percent increase to 20.4 percent. For the mobile PC realm, Intel once again saw a decline as its 84.4 percent share took a 1.9 percent quarter to quarter tumble, with AMD again seeing a nearly 2 percent gain in its 15.2 percent stake. In the desktop PC segment, AMD grabbed an additional 1.5 percent, bringing its stake to 28.9 percent, with Intel’s 70.9 percent share dropping 1.5 percent versus Q1 2011. Wondering where the second place chip maker got its second quarter stride? According to the research firm, its new Fusion platform, along with Intel’s, now accounts for “more than 60% of total PC processor unit volume in 2Q11.” You paying attention, Sandy? It’s time to sleep with one eye open.

[Image credit via Vault Networks]

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AMD’s market share tiptoes higher, Intel still ruler of the roost originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FiOS dominates as FCC measures actual Internet speeds



ISP speeds throughout a day
FCC

For the first time ever, the FCC has collected data (PDF) showing real-world speeds that Americans receive from their Internet providers. And the news is pretty good! Or, perhaps, it’s pretty bad!

Advocacy group Free Press blasted the results, released today. “No matter how industry tries to put a positive spin on these results, the report shows conclusively that many Americans are simply not getting what they pay for,” said research director S. Derek Turner in a statement. “This study indicates Comcast, Cox, and Verizon FiOS largely perform well, but other companies like Cablevision, AT&T, MediaCom, and Frontier all fail to deliver their customers the quality of service promised.

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What Does ’100% Juice’ Mean?

Buying fruit juice at the supermarket is a surprisingly complicated task that leads to myriad questions. What’s really in that “100% juice”? Why does that “juice” have the word “cocktail” loitering behind it? Let’s take a look at the exciting world of juice labeling.

What does “100% juice” mean?

As you might guess, that label legally means that everything in the bottle or carton was expressed from a fruit or vegetable. Seems straightforward enough, right? Not quite. Things are a little trickier. The “100% juice” label means that everything in the bottle came from a fruit or vegetable, not necessarily the fruit or vegetable you think you’re chugging.

So what fruits are in the bottle, then?

Juice makers have a problem. High-end fruit juices are delicious, but they’re also expensive. It’s tough to turn out an affordable product when you’ve got to squeeze loads of pricey fruits to produce a single bottle. To save money, companies dilute their wares with cheaper juices like white grape, apple, or pear. The finished product is still 100% fruit juice, but it may not be juice from the fruit you were expecting.

How can you tell what’s really in the bottle?

The FDA has a slew of naming and labeling restrictions that would be too confusing to remember; the prose stylings in the labeling regulations bear a more-than-passing resemblance to the tax code. The easiest solution to sniffing out what you’re really drinking is to have a look at the ingredients list rather than just taking the product name’s word for it.

What about the fruit cocktails and “drinks” that line the shelves?

Those drinks are a totally different animal. Unless a beverage is 100% juice, the FDA won’t let companies refer to it as a juice without jumping through some other hoops. If a drink is diluted to less than “100% juice,” the FDA’s rules stipulate that the word “juice” must be qualified with an additional term like “beverage,” “drink,” or “cocktail.”

What other beverages have to declare their percentage of juice?

Surprisingly, a few types of bar mix are legally obligated to declare what sort of juice they’re packing. According to FDA rules, if a bar mix “purports to contain juice,” it must declare what percentage of juice is in the final product. For example, the FDA writes, “Bloody Mary mix, by appearance and taste, purports to contain tomato juice and thus would be required to bear a statement as to the percentage of juice contained in the product.”

Same goes for strawberry daiquiri mix, but only if “its label or labeling also includes pictures of the juice dripping from strawberries or if the product looks and tastes like it contains strawberry juice or strawberry pulp.” If the product billed itself as “strawberry-flavored daiquiri mix,” it would be in the clear from a labeling perspective.

Are there any other exceptions to the labeling rules?

The FDA doesn’t require companies to disclose the percentage of juice if the juice in question is only used in minor amounts for flavoring and the drink doesn’t have anything on its label or in its appearance, like pulp, that would make a consumer think it was a fruit juice. That’s how a drink like Mountain Dew can avoid saying just how much of its recipe comes from orange juice. (There goes our plan to use Mountain Dew to ward off colds.)

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What Does ’100% Juice’ Mean?

New Android trojan records phone calls, shares with remote server

A new Android trojan has cropped up that records phone calls and related information, according to a blog post by an employee of security company Total Defense. The trojan is triggered when the Android device places or receives a phone call. It saves the audio file and related information to the phone’s microSD card, and includes a configuration file with information on a remote server and settings used by the trojan.

According to the post, the trojan presents itself as an “Android System Message” that requires users to press an “Install” button for it to insert itself in the phone. Once installed, the trojan records all incoming and outgoing calls to a directory on the microSD card as .amr files, as well as information about the call, including its duration, in a text file.

One of the background services of the trojan can “send the recorded call files to the [remote] server when a fresh call record is created,” Dinesh Venkatesan, author of the blog post, told Ars. However, due to a typo in the code, that portion of the process can’t be carried out at present.

To be fair, the pop-up install dialog for the Trojan effectively describes in bullet points all the nefarious things it’s about to do, including “record audio” and “read phone state and identity.” Anyone paying a little attention to what their phone is doing would notice, but if the dialog is placed interstitially during another download that appears more legitimate and has visually similar install screens, it could rely on users’ impatience to embed itself in the phone.

Venkatesan told Ars that the trojan has not been spotted in the wild, but rather on a “malware collection channel,” and he wasn’t sure how it would manifest itself in the real world. One of the most popular vectors for trojans and malware so far has been the Android Market store. While Google’s remote kill switch can clean malware-ridden apps obtained from the store off infected handsets, as in the case of DroidDream Light, the damage from a trojan working with a remote server like this might so not easily be undone.

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Kingston HyperX SSDs now shipping, SandForce-equipped for Hyperspeed

Brace yourselves speed freaks — Kingston Digital is now shipping its latest 2.5-inch HyperX SSD drives, equipped with 6Gb/sec SATA Rev 3.0 and everyone’s favorite SandForce SF-2281 controller. You want fast? You’ll get fast, alright. This SSD’s read / write speeds top out at 555MB/sec and 510MB/sec, which is surely enough to keep your rig zipping through those intense gaming marathons office workloads. You’ll be able to pick up the drive itself with 120GB of storage for $270 or 240GB for $520, while the install kit — which includes such goodies as a SATA cable, desktop mount, torque screws and more — tacks on an extra $15 and $20, respectively. That pricing is only for a limited time though, so be sure to check the PR and hyper-edited video past the break for all the details.

Continue reading Kingston HyperX SSDs now shipping, SandForce-equipped for Hyperspeed

Kingston HyperX SSDs now shipping, SandForce-equipped for Hyperspeed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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