Tag: deals

FCC Formalizes Massive Fines For Selling, Using Cell-Phone Jammers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: Two years ago the FCC announced its intention to fine a Chinese electronics maker $34.9 million and a Florida man $48, 000 for respectively selling and using illegal cell-phone jammers. Today the agency has issued press releases telling us that those fines have finally been made official, without either of the offending parties having bothered to mount a formal defense of their actions. From the press release announcing the fine against CTS. Technology: ” The company’s website falsely claimed that some jammers had been approved by the FCC, and advertised that the company could ship signal jammers to consumers in the United States.” The company did not respond to the FCC’s allegations, although the agency does report that changes were made to its website that appear to be aimed at complying with U.S. law. Next up is Florida man, Jason R. Humphreys, who is alleged to have used a jammer on his commute: “Mr. Humphreys’ illegal operation of the jammer continued for up to two years, caused interference to cellular service along Interstate 4, and disrupted police communications.” Last Fall, a Chicagoan was arrested for using a cell-phone jammer to make his subway commute more tolerable. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FCC Formalizes Massive Fines For Selling, Using Cell-Phone Jammers

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

Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Google’s low-cost Chromebooks outsold Apple’s range of Macs for the first time in the U.S. recently. IDC analyst Linn Huang confirmed the milestone to The Verge. “Chrome OS overtook Mac OS in the US in terms of shipments for the first time in 1Q16, ” says Huang. “Chromebooks are still largely a US K-12 story.” IDC estimates Apple’s U.S. Mac shipments to be around 1.76 million in the latest quarter, meaning Dell, HP, and Lenovo sold nearly 2 million Chromebooks in Q1 combined. Chromebooks have been extremely popular in US schools, and it’s clear from IDC’s comments the demand is driving US shipments. Outside of the US, it’s still unclear exactly how well Google’s low-cost laptops are doing. Most data from market research firms like IDC and Gartner focuses solely on Google’s wins in the US. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US

Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore’s Law 7 Years Into The Future

An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Google says its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. “TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA, ” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday. The chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, world champion of the game called Go. “We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law), ” said Google’s blog post. “TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly.” The chip is called the Tensor Processing Unit because it underpins TensorFlow, the software engine that powers its deep learning services under an open-source license. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore’s Law 7 Years Into The Future

890 College Students Sue Google Over Email Scanning

An anonymous reader quotes this report from Bay Area Newsgroup: Legal action against Google by four UC Berkeley students has ballooned into two lawsuits by 890 U.S. college students and alumni alleging the firm harvested their data for commercial gain without their consent…making the same claim: that Google’s Apps for Education, which provided them with official university email accounts to use for school and personal communication, allowed Google until April 2014 to scan their emails without their consent for advertising purposes…. The suit by 710 students alleged that until April 2015, Google denied it was scanning students’ emails for advertising purposes and misled schools into believing the emails were private. The students’ lawyers say each student is seeking a maximum of $10, 000, while the U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh told the lawyer that “Our clerk’s office is really unhappy you are circumventing our [$400 per case] filing fees by adding 710 cases under one case number.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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890 College Students Sue Google Over Email Scanning

Mac Users Reporting Widespread System Freezes With OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Update

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: A large number of MacBook Pro owners running OS X El Capitan are reporting widespread system freezes since installing the 10.11.4 update to Apple’s Mac OS. The problem appears to be concentrated on 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros (Early 2015) running 10.11.4. Users report that their system becomes totally unresponsive at seemingly random times, with no way to regain access to their Mac other than to force a hard reboot. The issue was initially reported by MacRumors forum member Antonnn on March 25, four days after Apple released what is the third update to the Mac OS. In Antonnn’s case, the freezes have been occurring “about once a week, ” first when browsing in Safari, but then also during the use of other Mac apps, including Adobe Photoshop and several third-party browsers. The freeze seems to affect not only the screen and mouse cursor but also the Mac’s Force Touch trackpad, which completely loses feedback. Apple Support is apparently aware of the issue but have so far offered no concrete solution. Meanwhile, some users have resorted to downgrading their system to 10.11.3 by restoring from a Time Machine backup or performing a clean install. Hundreds of others have posted to a dedicated thread discussing the issue. Bill Mattheis posted a video on YouTube of the freezing he has experienced on his MacBook Pro. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mac Users Reporting Widespread System Freezes With OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Update

Apple Invests $1 Billion In Uber’s Chinese Rival Didi

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple Inc. invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-sharing service Didi, making one of its biggest bets on software and services and dealing a blow to Uber Technologies Inc.’s ambitions in the country. The iPhone maker will help Uber’s largest rival build up a ride-sharing platform that handles more than 11 million rides a day and serves about 300 million users across China, Didi said in a statement on Friday. Executive Officer Tim Cook has highlighted higher-margin services as a growth area and suggested he would use some of its $200 billion-plus cash hoard for investments. The investment in one of China’s largest online companies will allow Apple to forge alliances in its single largest market outside of the United States. Didi, incorporated as Xiaoju Kuaizhi Inc., is in the process of raising more than $2 billion at a valuation of about $25 billion, people familiar with the matter have said. It operates in 400 Chinese cities and works with more than 14 million Chinese car owners. The company is Uber’s most potent rival and has formed an international coalition with Lyft Inc. in the U.S., India’s Ola and Southeast Asia’s Grab to fight the globally expanding San Francisco firm. Apple is hoping to reinvigorate lackluster iPhone sales in China with its $1 billion investment in Didi. The last big investment the company made was when it acquired Beats for $3 billion in 2014. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Invests $1 Billion In Uber’s Chinese Rival Didi

Kobo Customers Losing Books From Their Libraries After Software Upgrade

Reader Robotech_Master writes: After a recent Kobo software upgrade, a number of Kobo customers have reported losing e-books from their libraries — notably, e-books that had been transferred to Kobo from their Sony Reader libraries when Sony left the consumer e-book business. One customer reported missing 460 e-books, and the only way to get them back in her library would be to search and re-add them one at a time! Customers who downloaded their e-books and illegally broke the DRM don’t have this problem, of course.From the report: A Kobo representative actually chimed in on the thread, telling MobileRead users that they were following the thread and trying to fix the glitches that had been caused by the recent software changes and restore customers’ e-books. It’s good that they’re paying attention, and that’s definitely better than my first go-round with Barnes and Noble support over my own missing e-book. Hopefully they’ll get it sorted out soon. That being said, this drives home yet again the point that publisher-imposed DRM has made and is making continued maintenance of e-book libraries from commercial providers a big old mess. About the only way you can be sure you can retain the e-books you pay for is to outright break the law and crack the DRM in order to be able to back them up against your company going out of business and losing the purchases you paid for. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Kobo Customers Losing Books From Their Libraries After Software Upgrade

Tucows Bans Pop-Up Ads, Goes Ad-Free

HughPickens.com writes: Tucows began as a software downloads site nearly 25 years ago and has since evolved beyond that early core business and into domain names, mobile phone service and symmetrical gigabit fiber Internet in select towns and cities in the US. Now Tucows has announced that as a gesture of goodwill, Tucows has banned deceptive ads, hidden download buttons, pop-ups, flypaper, toolbars and other such Internet nastiness from the the nearly 40, 000 software titles it hosts for users on it’s download sites. “On the Tucows downloads site today, you’ll find no flashing ads. No toolbars. No pop-ups, ” says CEO Elliot Noss. “You might see a few plugs for other Tucows services, but nothing too egregious and certainly not anything that’s pretending to be a download button.” With Tucows’ success in domain names, mobile phone service (Ting) and fiber Internet (Ting Internet), Tucows’ revenue from downloads has become less relevant when looking at the balance sheet. “We don’t lightly walk away from opportunities or revenue, ” says Noss. “In the end, though, we’d rather have the Tucows name associated with good; with a belief in the power of the Internet to affect positive change. An ad-heavy site that packages browser toolbars along with every download isn’t something we want people to think of when they hear ‘Tucows, ‘.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tucows Bans Pop-Up Ads, Goes Ad-Free