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Re/code: Apple’s next iPhone event happens on September 9

This iPhone 5S is likely to be superseded in September. Andrew Cunningham After a summer full of rumors and part leaks, Re/code reports that Apple is planning to hold its next iPhone event on Tuesday, September 9. Re/code co-founder Walt Mossberg has a long history with Apple and his prior publication AllThingsD correctly predicted the dates Apple’s iPhone and iPad events last year, so there’s a good chance this is the real thing. This year Apple is widely expected to release a redesigned “iPhone 6” with a larger screen. Reports have varied, but anonymous sources have told multiple publications that the company is planning a 4.7-inch phone to rival “normal” handsets from competitors, as well as a 5.5-inch version intended to compete with so-called “phablet” phones like Samsung’s Galaxy Note series. Last year’s top-end iPhone 5S and midrange iPhone 5C were both refinements of the iPhone 5 design introduced in 2012 . Apple also uses its iPhone events to announce final release dates for new iOS versions, which have for the past two years have come out on the second Wednesday after the iPhone unveiling. This means a final release of iOS 8 is likely on or near September 17, assuming Apple doesn’t change its plans. iOS 8 will refine the new design introduced in iOS 7 , allow iOS devices to work more closely with Macs running OS X Yosemite, and introduce a number of under-the-hood improvements including Extensions. Third-generation Apple TVs will receive an updated UI, as well. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Re/code: Apple’s next iPhone event happens on September 9

LinkedIn paying shorted employees $6 million in unpaid wages, damages

Professional-networking site LinkedIn is agreeing to pay nearly $3.35 million in unpaid overtime to 359 workers, in addition to $2.5 million in damages under a deal announced Monday with the US Department of Labor. The accord covers current and former employees at LinkedIn offices in California, Illinois, Nebraska, and New York. “This company has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make workers whole,” David Weil, administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, said in a statement. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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LinkedIn paying shorted employees $6 million in unpaid wages, damages

Mount your hard drive… on your RAM?

A weird place for an SSD. Apacer PC makers do all kinds of things to save space inside their cases, but this is a new one to us: Apacer is apparently sampling sticks of DDR3 desktop RAM that include slots for M.2 SSD add-in boards and CFast CompactFlash cards, allowing you to mount storage devices directly to your RAM rather than using slots on the motherboard. The slots will still use the SATA III interface to transfer data—they’re just mounted to the RAM and they draw power through the RAM slot. These sticks will support all three lengths of M.2 SSD boards (2242, 2260, and 2280). That’s especially useful because, as AnandTech points out , only one mini-ITX desktop motherboard can directly support full-length M.2 boards. Full-length M.2 boards are necessary to accommodate higher storage capacities—currently available drives top out at 512GB, but 1TB drives are on the horizon . Connectors visible on top of the DIMMs would likely need to be connected to the SATA connectors on your motherboard; unfortunately it doesn’t look like these can take advantage of the faster PCI-Express flavor of M.2. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

What we judge when we judge freemium, and the money we’ve spent on Hearthstone

BagoGames Few people know what to make of the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood mobile game. By reputation it’s boring, vapid, materialistic, and shallow—according to many serious gamers—and is deplorable not least because players can spend money to get ahead. The wails only grew louder when reports indicated that the game earned $1.6 million in its first five days and is on track to make $200 million in annual revenue , according to one analyst. While many gamers and gaming journalists struggled to figure out why anyone would spend money on a game made by and featuring a reality TV star, we aren’t totally in the dark. For one, casting shade on the subject matter is a value judgment of a certain set of interests and lifestyle. And on a meta level, how people use their leisure time . Let he who has lived every moment deliberately immersed in deep consideration of the universe cast the first Angry Bird. Materialism in games probably does not cause materialism in the streets . For another, Kim K is actually pretty self-aware of its own materialism and glorification of social climbing and has a sense of irony about the world it gives players to try and thrive in. To wit, one of the things you can spend in-game money on is new body parts. Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What we judge when we judge freemium, and the money we’ve spent on Hearthstone

Podcasting patent troll: We tried to drop lawsuit against Adam Carolla

wasim muklashy Personal Audio LLC is an East Texas shell company that gleaned national attention when it claimed it had the right to demand cash from every podcaster. The company was wielding a patent on “episodic content,” which it said included anyone doing a podcast, as well as many types of online video. Now the company is trying to walk away from its highest-profile lawsuit against comedian Adam Carolla—but Carolla won’t let the case drop. In a statement released today, Personal Audio says that Carolla, who has raised more than $450,000 from fans to fight the case, is wasting their money on an unnecessary lawsuit. The company, which is a “patent troll” with no business other than lawsuits, has said Carolla just doesn’t care since his fans are paying his lawyers’ bills. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Podcasting patent troll: We tried to drop lawsuit against Adam Carolla

It’s not just Verizon: All major US carriers throttle “unlimited” data

Verizon Wireless One of the most common reactions to Verizon’s announcement that it will throttle the heaviest users of its “unlimited” 4G plans went something like this: “That’s the last straw, I’m switching to T-Mobile!” Unfortunately, switching to T-Mobile, AT&T, or Sprint won’t protect you from getting throttled, even if the carrier is claiming to sell you “unlimited” data. Let’s take a look at the relevant passages in each carrier’s terms and conditions. We’ll start with the Verizon Wireless announcement last week: Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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It’s not just Verizon: All major US carriers throttle “unlimited” data

Bose accuses Beats of using patented noise-cancelling tech

Bose Corp. filed a lawsuit on Friday that accuses popular headphone maker Beats Electronics of infringing upon several of its patents. The suit claims that Bose lost sales because Beats—which Apple announced it would acquire for $3 billion in May—used patented noise-cancelling technology in its Studio and Studio Wireless headphone lines. Beats’ products that allegedly use the technology “can also be used for noise cancellation when no music is played, a feature that Beats also advertises,” the suit states. “Thus, Beats specifically encourages users to use the infringing functionality. Beats advertises no method to turn off features that cause end users to directly infringe.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bose accuses Beats of using patented noise-cancelling tech

Why Google took years to address a battery-draining “bug” in Chrome

Aurich Lawson A recent Forbes report says that Chrome on Windows uses up more battery than competing browsers, thanks to a high system timer setting. Unlike Linux or Mac OS X, Windows uses a timer to schedule tasks. At idle, the timer on Windows is set to about 15 ms, so if it has no work to do, it will go to sleep and only wake up every 15 ms to check if it needs to do something. Applications can change this timer, and other browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer don’t mess with it until they need to do something processor intensive, like playing a video. After the video is done, the timer is set to return to 15 ms so that the computer can idle again. Chrome, though, boosts the timer to 1 ms and keeps it there forever. The difference means that on Firefox at idle, the CPU only wakes 64 times a second. On Chrome, it wakes up 1,000 times a second. In its Windows documentation, Microsoft notes that setting the system timer to a high value can increase power consumption by “as much as 25 percent.” This means that on a laptop, you’ll get a shorter runtime with Chrome than you will on a competing browser. And the issue has been around for a long time. Forbes links to a bug report documenting the problem that was first filed in 2010. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Google took years to address a battery-draining “bug” in Chrome

Id shows off double-jumping, skull-crushing new Doom at QuakeCon

If you weren’t at QuakeCon, this content-free teaser is all you get to see of the new Doom for the time being. The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas’ QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game, which somehow hasn’t been leaked online yet. The good news is that plenty of people that were there are reporting on the unveiling, which seemed to include a number of extremely un- Doom -like additions. One of the bigger changes brought by the new Doom (which is notably not being called Doom 4 anymore ) is a jet-pack powered double-jump, à la Crysis 3 , Titanfall , Destiny and, now, presumably, every first-person shooter to come out in the next year or two. Players can also climb up the sides of “large crates and gaps” according to PC Gamer’s report , adding even more ability to go vertical. But it’s the Mortal Kombat -style melee finishing moves that seem to have gotten the crowd the most riled up. PC Gamer describes how, once an enemy is low on health, the player can get close and activate moves that see “lower jaws pulled off, skulls stomped on, and hearts torn out with the level of detail usually reserved for those slow-mo bullet cams in the Sniper Elite series.” Rock Paper Shotgun noted that “enemies break apart like moldy bread… literally tearing them in half sometimes.” The outlet also reported scenes with “crushing heads, chunks flying everywhere.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets

At least 13,000 Chicago motorists have been cited with undeserved tickets thanks to malfunctioning red-light cameras, according to a 10-month investigation published Friday by the Chicago Tribune . The report found that the $100 fines were a result of “faulty equipment, human tinkering or both.” According to the investigation: Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back to normal. Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563 tickets—560 of them for rolling rights. Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or after when no tickets were issued—downtimes suggesting human intervention that should have been documented. City officials said they cannot explain the absence of such records. City officials and Redflex Traffic Systems of Arizona, the report said, “acknowledged oversight failures and said the explosions of tickets should have been detected and resolved as they occurred. But they said that doesn’t mean the drivers weren’t breaking the law, and they defended the red light camera program overall as a safety success story. The program has generated nearly $500 million in revenue since it began in 2003.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets