funny – Page 208

Mozilla Tests Improved Privacy Mode For Firefox

An anonymous reader writes: Firefox’s privacy mode stops your computer from keeping track of where you’ve browsed, but it doesn’t do anything about external tracking. A new feature just rolled out to the Developer Edition and the Aurora channel now actively tries to block online services from tracking you. “Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you’re sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide.” The feature uses a blocklist maintained by Disconnect.me to stop you from navigating to sites known to log your personal data. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Tests Improved Privacy Mode For Firefox

CNN and CBC Sued For Pirating YouTube Video

vivaoporto sends word that in a rare case of an individual taking on large corporations for copyright infrigement, a New York man has sued news networks CNN and CBC after they took a video of his from YouTube and broadcast it on the air without licensing it. His video shows a winter storm in Buffalo generating huge amounts of lake effect snow. The man, Alfonzo Cutaia, decided to enable monetization on his video, selecting the “Standard YouTube License, ” “a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of [the video]. All other rights are reserved to the copyright owner and standard copyright laws and exceptions apply.” Cutaia says the CBC used his video with their logo on it. The CBC confirmed this, and said they received a 10-day license from CNN, who had no legal right to do so. His lawsuit now accuses them both of “intentional and willful” copyright infringement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CNN and CBC Sued For Pirating YouTube Video

Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries

ckwu writes: The designs of pacemakers, watches, and other wearable gadgets have to be tailored around existing battery shapes, such as cylinders, coin cells, and rectangles. But a team of researchers hopes their fully printable, flexible lithium-ion batteries will one day free designers from these constraints. Battery shapes are now limited because of the need to contain liquid electrolytes. Two years ago, the researchers designed a printable, solid-state electrolyte composed of alumina nanoparticles and lithium combined with polymer that can be cured by ultraviolet light. In this latest work, they used a stencil printing technique to print full battery cells with the electrolyte and other printable materials for the electrodes. They printed batteries on paper and the curved surface of a glass mug. These printed Li-ion batteries can power small LEDs but still need a lot of improvements because they don’t last long before needing recharging. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries

Samsung Unveils V-NAND High Performance SSDs, Fast NVMe Card At 5.5GB Per Second

MojoKid writes: Sometimes it’s the enterprise sector that gets dibs on the coolest technology, and so it goes with a trio of TCO-optimized, high-performance solid state drives from Samsung that were just announced, all three of which are based on three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory technology. The fastest of bunch can read data at up to 5, 500 megabytes per second. That’s the rated sequential read speed of Samsung’s PM1725, a half-height, half-length (HHHL) PCIe card-type NVMe SSD. Other rated specs include a random read speed of up to 1, 000, 000 IOPS, random write performance of up to 120, 000 IOPS, and sequential writes topping out at 1, 800MB/s. The PM1725 comes in just two beastly storage capacities, 3.2TB and 6.4TB, the latter of which is rated to handle five drive writes per day (32TB) for five years. Samsung also introduced two other 3D V-NAND products, the PM1633 and PM953. The PM1633 is a 2.5-inch 12Gb/s SAS SSD that will be offered in 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB, and 3.84TB capacities. As for the PM953, it’s an update to the SM951 and is available in M.2 and 2.5-inch form factors at capacities up to 1.92TB. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Unveils V-NAND High Performance SSDs, Fast NVMe Card At 5.5GB Per Second

Continued Cord Cutting Hits the Pay TV Business Hard

An anonymous reader writes: Cord cutting is not a new concern for the pay TV business but a recent massive sell-off in media stocks has many in the industry worried. Cable, satellite and TV companies suffered their worst-ever quarterly subscriber declines losing more than half a million accounts, sending stocks tumbling. Researchers say this may be the beginning of the end for the pay TV business. According to analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson: “A year ago, the Pay TV sector was shrinking at an annual rate of 0.1 percent. A year later, the rate at which the Pay TV sector is declining has quickened to 0.7 percent year-over-year. That may not seem like a mass exodus, but it is a big change in a short period of time. And the rate of decline is still accelerating.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Continued Cord Cutting Hits the Pay TV Business Hard

Google Is Restructuring Under a New Company Called Alphabet

Mark Wilson writes: Sundar Pichai is the new CEO of Google as the company undergoes a huge restructuring. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are moving to a new company called Google Alphabet which will serve as an umbrella company for Google and its various projects. Google itself is being, in Page’s words, “slimmed down” and the change is quite an extraordinary one. Page quotes the original founders’ letter that was written 11 years go. It states that “Google is not a conventional company”, and today’s announcement makes that perfectly clear. There’s a lot to take in…Google Alphabet is, essentially, the new face of Google. Page chose to make the announcement in a blog post that went live after the stock markets closed. This is more than just a rebranding, it is a complete shakeup, the scale of which is almost unprecedented. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why the Freemium Business Model Isn’t What It Used To Be

mattydread23 writes: A few years ago, every enterprise software company was trying freemium — the idea of giving a product away to build users, then charging for additional features. Now, that model seems to be losing favor, except with open source software. Business Insider talks to enterprise founders and VCs to figure out why ‘freemium’ wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why the Freemium Business Model Isn’t What It Used To Be

Study: Ad Blocker Use Jumps 41 Percent

Mickeycaskill writes: A report from Adobe and anti-ad blocking startup PageFair says the number of ad block users worldwide has increased by 41 percent in the past 12 months to 198 million monthly active users. The study suggests the growing popularity of ad blocking software is set to cost online publishers $21.8 billion in 2015 and could reach $41.4 billion by 2016. “About 45 million of them are in the United States, with almost 15 percent of people in states like New York and California relying on these services. The figures are even higher in Europe, where 77 million people use versions of the software. In Poland, more than a third of people regularly block online ads.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Study: Ad Blocker Use Jumps 41 Percent

Windows 10 RSAT, Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 Coming This Month

We’ve heard a lot lately about the release and reception of Windows 10; however, the Windows family includes more than just the most-seen desktop OS. Mark Wilson writes: Microsoft’s Gabe Aul has revealed that the company plans to release a new technical preview of Windows Server 2016 later this month. Responding to questions on Twitter, the company’s Corporate Vice President and face of the Windows Insider program also said that Windows 10 RSAT [Remote Server Administration Tools] will be launched in August. Unlike the preview builds of Windows 10, previews of the latest edition of Windows Server have been slower to creep out of Redmond. Sysadmins will be keen to get their hands on the latest builds to see just what direction Microsoft is taking with its server software after the decision to delay the launch. We don’t know anything about what the third technical preview of Windows Server 2016 might include, but it is likely to be little more than a collection of bug fixes and tweaks. It’s a little late in the game to expect any major changes to be made. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Military Data Center In a Suitcase To Get Commercial Release

judgecorp writes: The Mobyl Data Center, designed for the US Department of Defense, puts a data center in a rugged suitcase-sized box, and it will shortly be available commercially. The box includes up to 88 Xeon cores a maximum of 176 GB of RAM, and 2.8 TB of SSD storage with 12TB of hard disk as an option. The system uses credit-card sized MobylPC server units, sealed in epoxy, and rated to survive 300g of shock, but apparently proprietary to the vendor, Arnouse Digital Devices Corp. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Military Data Center In a Suitcase To Get Commercial Release

Ken May

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