iPhone 5c Rumor Roundup: Everything We Think We Know

With Apple’s next big iPhone event right around the corner , the rumor mill is churning at full speed. On September 10th, we’ll know if Cupertino’s nextcbig thing really is the long-fabled “budget iPhone.” For the moment, it’s still anyone’s guess, but here’s everything we think we know about the elusive iPhone 5c. Read more…        

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iPhone 5c Rumor Roundup: Everything We Think We Know

Studying the Slow Decay of a Laptop Battery For an Entire Year

First time accepted submitter jradavenport writes “I’ve been keeping a log of the health of my MacBook Air battery for the past year, taking samples every minute I use the computer (152, 411 readings so far!). This has allowed me to study both my own computing/work habits, but also the fascinating rapid decay of battery capacity. Comparing it to my previous 2009 MacBook Pro, the battery in this 2012 Air is degrading much faster.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Studying the Slow Decay of a Laptop Battery For an Entire Year

The Mysterious Magnetar WIth an Insanely Strong Magnetic Field

A team of scientists using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope have discovered a weird dead star , which hides one of the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe. Read more…        

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The Mysterious Magnetar WIth an Insanely Strong Magnetic Field

Cisco Slashes 4,000 Jobs

Dawn Kawamoto writes “Cisco’s CEO John Chambers dealt employees a blow Wednesday, saying the networking giant would cut 4, 000 workers from the payroll. Not quite a death blow, but this 5 percent cut could leave some employees gasping. Chambers took the knife to Cisco last year, cutting 2 percent of its workforce.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cisco Slashes 4,000 Jobs

Look At All the Creepy Stuff Inside a Single Drop of Pond Water

Wow. This is incredible. Captured by high-definition microscopy, the footage shows the buzzing world and slimy life inside a single drop of pond water. It’s completely alien, it’s unnerving and it makes your stomach turn itself inside out. There are brown flatworms, Medusa looking nematodes, starfish-like hydras ‘defecating’ and more oozy organisms. Read more…        

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Look At All the Creepy Stuff Inside a Single Drop of Pond Water

Repair a Broken Headphone Plug for $2

The danger of buying expensive headphones is that no matter how good the sound quality is, you run the risk of ruining it by breaking a flimsy piece of rubber and metal. Or you can fix the plug for a couple bucks. Read more…        

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Repair a Broken Headphone Plug for $2

Test How Old Your Ears Are (And How Much Damage You’ve Done to Them)

Deep down we all know we shouldn’t crank our music or listen to headphones with the volume really high, but we still do. And if you’ve ever wondered if years of hard rock has done any serious damage, here’s an easy way to find out . Read more…        

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Test How Old Your Ears Are (And How Much Damage You’ve Done to Them)

Xerox Confirms To David Kriesel Number Mangling Occuring On Factory Settings

An anonymous reader writes with a followup to last week’s report that certain Xerox scanners and copiers could alter numbers as they scanned documents: “In the second Xerox press statement, Rick Dastin, Vice President at Xerox Corporation, stated: ‘You will not see a character substitution issue when scanning with the factory default settings.’ In contrast, David Kriesel, who brought up the issue in the first place, was able to replicate the issue with the very same factory settings. This might be a serious problem now. Not only does the problem occur using default settings and everyone may be affected, additionally, their press statements may have misled customers. Xerox replicated the issue by following Kriesel’s instructions, later confirming it to Kriesel. Whole image segments seem to be copied around the scanned data. There is also a new Xerox statement out now.” Swapping numbers while copying may seem like bizarre behavior for a copier, but In comments on the previous posting, several readers pointed out that Xerox was aware of the problem, and acknowledged it in the machine’s documentation; the software updates promised should be welcome news to anyone who expectes a copier to faithfully reproduce important numbers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Xerox Confirms To David Kriesel Number Mangling Occuring On Factory Settings

Hybrid Hard Drives Just Need 8GB of NAND

judgecorp writes “Research from Seagate suggests that hybrid hard drives in general use are virtually as good as solid state drives if they have just 8GB of solid state memory. The research found that normal office computers, not running data-centric applications, access just 9.58GB of unique data per day. 8GB is enough to store most of that, and results in a drive which is far cheaper than an all-Flash device. Seagate is confident enough to ease off on efforts to get data off hard drives quickly, and rely on cacheing instead. It will cease production of 7200 RPM laptop drives at the end of 2013, and just make models running at 5400 RPM.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hybrid Hard Drives Just Need 8GB of NAND

China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem

An anonymous reader writes “The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit. The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That’s the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update. According to analytics company Net Applications, 37.2% of the globe’s personal computers ran Windows XP last month. If Microsoft’s estimate of 1.4 billion Windows PCs worldwide is accurate, XP’s share translates into nearly 570 million machines. In the U.S., 16.4% of all personal computers ran Windows XP in July, or about one in six, Net Applications’ data showed. But in China, 72.1% of the country’s computers relied on the soon-to-retire operating system last month, or nearly three out of every four systems.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem