funny – Page 243 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Telegram Not Dead STOP Alive, Evolving In Japan STOP

itwbennett writes Japan is one of the last countries in the world where telegrams are still widely used. A combination of traditional manners, market liberalization and innovation has kept alive this age-old form of messaging. Companies affiliated with the country’s three mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, offer telegrams, which are sent via modern server networks instead of the dedicated electrical wires of the past (Morse telegraphy hasn’t been used since 1962), and then printed out with modern printers instead of tape glued on paper. But customers are still charged according to the length of the message, which is delivered within three hours. A basic NTT telegram up to 25 characters long can be sent for ¥440 ($4.30) when ordered online. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Telegram Not Dead STOP Alive, Evolving In Japan STOP

Cisco To Slash Up To 6,000 Jobs — 8% of Its Workforce — In "Reorganization"

alphadogg (971356) writes “Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6, 000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said. ‘If we don’t have the courage to change, if we don’t lead the change, we will be left behind, ‘ Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cisco To Slash Up To 6,000 Jobs — 8% of Its Workforce — In "Reorganization"

Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched

MojoKid (1002251) writes Though solid state drives have a long way to go before they break price parity with hard drives and may never with, at least with the current technology, the gap continues to close. More recently, SSD manufacturers have been approaching 50 cents per GiB of storage. OCZ Storage Solutions, with the help of their parent company Toshiba’s 19nm MLC NAND, just launched their ARC 100 family of drives that are priced at exactly .5 per GiB at launch and it’s possible street prices will drift lower down the road. The ARC 100 features the very same OCZ Barefoot 3 M10 controller as the higher-end OCZ Vertex 460, but these new drives feature more affordable Toshiba A19nm (Advanced 19 nanometer) NAND flash memory. The ARC 100 also ships without any sort of accessory bundle, to keep costs down. Performance-wise, OCZ’s new ARC 100 240GB solid state drive didn’t lead the pack in any particular category, but the drive did offer consistently competitive performance throughout testing. Large sequential transfers, small file transfers at high queue depths, and low access times were the ARC 100’s strong suits, as well as its low cost. These new drives are rated at 20GB/day write endurance and carry a 3 year warranty. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Solid State Drives Break the 50 Cents Per GiB Barrier, OCZ ARC 100 Launched

Apple’s Diversity Numbers: 70% Male, 55% White

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has released a diversity report on the genders and races of its employees. As is common in the tech industry, the majority of Apple’s workforce is male — only three out of 10 employees around the globe are female. Broken down, males compose 65 percent of non-tech workers, 80 percent of tech workers, and 72 percent of Apple’s leadership. According to CEO Tim Cook, he’s unhappy with Apple’s diversity numbers and says Apple is working to improve them: “Apple is committed to transparency, which is why we are publishing statistics about the race and gender makeup of our company. Let me say up front: As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them. We are making progress, and we’re committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple’s Diversity Numbers: 70% Male, 55% White

Google Is Backing a New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable

An anonymous reader writes Google has announced it is backing plans to build and operate a new high-speed internet Trans-Pacific cable system called “FASTER.” In addition to Google, the $300 million project will be jointly managed by China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel, with NEC as the system supplier. FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies. The initial design capacity is expected to be 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs), connecting the US with two locations in Japan. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Is Backing a New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable

Netflix Now Works On Linux With HTML5 DRM Video Support In Chrome

An anonymous reader writes “Beginning with the Chrome 38 Beta it’s now possible to watch Netflix without any Wine/Silverlight plug-ins but will work natively using Chrome’s DRM-HTML5 video capabilities with Netflix. The steps just involve using the latest beta of Chrome and an HTTP user-agent switcher to tell Netflix you’re a Windows Chrome user, due to Netflix arbitrarily blocking the Linux build.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix Now Works On Linux With HTML5 DRM Video Support In Chrome

F-Secure: Xiaomi Smartphones Do Secretly Steal Your Data

They may be well reviewed and China’s new top selling phone, but reader DavidGilbert99 writes with reason to be cautious about Xiaomi’s phones: Finnish security firm F-Secure has seemingly proven that Xiaomi smartphones do in fact upload user data without their permission/knowledge despite the company strongly denying these allegations as late as 30 July. Between commercial malware and government agencies, how do you keep your phone’s data relatively private? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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F-Secure: Xiaomi Smartphones Do Secretly Steal Your Data

Study Finds That Astronauts Are Severely Sleep Deprived

sciencehabit (1205606) writes “Researchers tracked the sleep patterns of 85 crew members aboard the International Space Station and space shuttle and found that despite an official flight schedule mandating 8.5 hours of sleep per night, they rarely got more than five. In fact, getting a full night’s rest was so difficult that three-quarters of shuttle mission crew members used sleep medication, and sometimes entire teams were sedated on the same night. Given that sleep deprivation contributes to up to 80% of aviation accidents, it’s important to better understand why sleep is so difficult in space, the authors say.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cornering the Market On Zero-Day Exploits

Nicola Hahn (1482985) writes Kim Zetter of Wired Magazine has recently covered Dan Greer’s keynote speech at Black Hat USA. In his lengthy address Greer, representing the CIA’s venture funding arm, suggested that one way that the United States government could improve cyber security would be to use its unparalleled budget to buy up all the underground’s zero-day vulnerabilities. While this would no doubt make zero-day vendors like VUPEN and middlemen like the Grugq very wealthy, is this strategy really a good idea? Can the public really trust the NSA to do the right thing with all those zero-day exploits? Furthermore, recall the financial meltdown of 2008 where the public paid the bill for Wall Street’s greed. If the government pays for information on all these unpatched bugs would society simply be socializing the cost of hi-tech’s sloppy engineering? Whose interests does this “corner-the-market” approach actually serve? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cornering the Market On Zero-Day Exploits

Parallax Completes Open Hardware Vision With Open Source CPU

First time accepted submitter PotatoHead (12771) writes “This is a big win for Open Hardware Proponents! The Parallax Propeller Microcontroller VERILOG code was released today, and it’s complete! Everything you need to run Open Code on an Open CPU design. This matters because you can now build a device that is open hardware, open code all the way down to the CPU level! Either use a product CPU, and have access to it’s source code to understand what and how it does things, or load that CPU onto a suitable FPGA and modify it or combine it with your design.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.