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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

North Korea Is Switching To a New Time Zone

jones_supa writes: North Korea has announced that it is winding its clocks back by half a hour to create a new “Pyongyang Time” — breaking from a time standard imposed by what it called “wicked Japanese imperialists” more than a century ago. The change will put the standard time in North Korea at UTC +8:30. North Korea said that the time change, approved on Wednesday by its rubber-stamp parliament and officially announced on Friday, would come into effect from August 15, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean peninsula’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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North Korea Is Switching To a New Time Zone

Toshiba’s new flash chips hold twice the data

Judging by recent announcements, we’re about to enter a golden age of fast, nearly unlimited storage for all the high-res selfies you can shoot. Following an announcement by Intel and Micron last week , Toshiba and partner SanDisk revealed their own 256Gb flash chips. Toshiba already has the smallest flash cells in the world at 15 nanometers, which it stacks in 48 layers to maximize density. The new chips add in 3-bit tech (first used by Samsung ) to squeeze even more bytes in, helping it double the storage of chips it announced just a few months ago. The result will be faster and more reliable memory for smartphones, SSDs and other devices. Intel and Micron announced 256Gb chips using different, 32-layer tech earlier this year , so they may beat Toshiba/SanDisk to the manufacturing punch. Consumers will be the main beneficiaries of the rivalry, in any case. Micron said the tech will eventually yield up to 10TB laptop drives at much lower prices per gigabyte than current models. It’ll also result in cheaper and faster memory chips for smartphones and other mobile devices. Toshiba’s in the process of building its new fab plant in Japan, and said the 256Gb chips will be available sometime in 2016. Filed under: Storage Comments Source: Toshiba

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Toshiba’s new flash chips hold twice the data

LibreOffice 5.0 Released

New submitter ssam writes: The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android and Ubuntu touch compatibility, superior interoperability features, an updated UI, and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice it is probably time to move over. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 5.0 Released

Epson Is Trying To Kill the Printer Ink Cartridge

An anonymous reader writes: Inkjet printer cartridges have been the bane of many small businesses and home offices for decades. It’s interesting, then, that Epson is trying something new: next month, they’re launching a new line of printers that come with small tanks of ink, instead of cartridges. The tanks will be refilled using bottles of ink. They’re reversing the economics, here: the printer itself will be more expensive, but the refills will be much cheaper. Early reports claim you’ll be spending a tenth as much on ink as you were before, but we’ll see how that shakes out. The Bloomberg article makes a good point: it’s never been easier to not print things. The printer industry needs to innovate if it wants us to keep churning out printed documents, and this may be the first big step. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Latest Color-Changing Smart Bulb Turns Life Into a Rave

Even the light bulb, one of the earliest electrical inventions, can afford to have tweaks made. With this Kickstarter bulb , use your smartphone to switch the light’s color: anything from shades of white to Night at the Roxbury- invoking fuchsia. Imagine Hue that comes fully featured out of the box. Read more…

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The Latest Color-Changing Smart Bulb Turns Life Into a Rave

US Court: ‘Pocket-Dialed’ Calls Are Not Private

itwbennett writes: In a case of a pocket-dialed call, a conscientious secretary, and sensitive personnel issues, a federal appeals court in Ohio has ruled pocket-dialers shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy. ‘Under the plain-view doctrine, if a homeowner neglects to cover a window with drapes, he would lose his reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to a viewer looking into the window from outside of his property, ‘ the court said. The same applies to pocket-dialed calls, according to the court. If a person doesn’t take reasonable steps to keep their call private, their communications are not protected by the Wiretap Act. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gmail Spam Filter Changes Bite Linus Torvalds

An anonymous reader points out The Register’s story that recent changes to the spam filters that Google uses to pare down junk in gmail evidently are a bit overzealous. Linus Torvalds, who famously likes to manage by email, and whose email flow includes a lot of mailing lists, isn’t happy with it. Ironically perhaps, it was only last week that the Gmail team blogged that its spam filter’s rate of false positives is down to less than 0.05 per cent. In his post, Torvalds said his own experience belies that claim, and that around 30 per cent of the mail in his spam box turned out not to be spam. “It’s actually at the point where I’m noticing missing messages in the email conversations I see, because Gmail has been marking emails in the middle of the conversation as spam. Things that people replied to and that contained patches and problem descriptions, ” Torvalds wrote. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gmail Spam Filter Changes Bite Linus Torvalds

Popular Torrent Site Disappears From Google After Penalty

An anonymous reader writes: Following what appears to be a severe penalty, the popular torrent site KickassTorrents has become pretty much unfindable in Google. Meanwhile, the top search result in many locations points to a scam site that’s serving malware to its visitors. For now, only DuckDuckGo presents the real site as a main result. With millions of visitors per day, KickassTorrents is arguably the most visited torrent site on the Internet, and has gained new users during the moments when the notorious Pirate Bay has been offline. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paralyzed Man Hits the Streets of NYC In a New Exoskeleton

the_newsbeagle writes: Robert Woo was paralyzed in 2007 when a construction crane dropped a load of steel on him. Yesterday, he put on the newest “exoskeleton, ” essentially a pair of smart robotic legs, and strolled out into a busy Manhattan sidewalk. He was demoing the ReWalk 6.0, a $77, 000 device that he plans to buy for home use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Paralyzed Man Hits the Streets of NYC In a New Exoskeleton