user agreement – Page 75 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

AMD puts brakes on chip manufacturing as sales plummet

Windows 8 and the holidays have failed to give PC makers the usual yearly bump in sales, and now Advanced Micro Devices is paying the price. The company announced yesterday that it has reduced its chip manufacturing orders for the last three months of the company’s 2012 fiscal year by more than 75 percent, and it will pay a heavy penalty for the changes. In a new agreement signed with manufacturing partner GlobalFoundries , AMD reduced its promised silicon wafer purchases to just $115 million, down from $500 million, while agreeing to pay a $320 million penalty for the order change over the next year. AMD spun off GlobalFoundries in 2009, and in March of 2012 it sold off its remaining stake in the company , leaving an investment arm of the government of the United Arab Emirates as the company’s sole owner. The move is part of an emergency plan to keep AMD’s cash on hand up as revenues continue to slide. On a conference call yesterday, AMD interim Chief Financial Officer Devinder Kumar said, “Liquidity and cash management remain a key focus for AMD.” The chipmaker is still looking for a permanent CFO to fill the gap left by Thomas Seifert, who bailed on the company in September “to pursue other interests.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

iTunes (temporarily) serves porn images to Russian users

iTunes users in Russia got an eyeful on Wednesday (hat tip to Wired ) when a newly released version of the app displayed graphic images of porn instead of the foreign films they were expecting. The bug, reported to be present in the iTunes Store shown to users in Russia, is most likely the result of images that were linked to xxx.xxx. Security experts speculate it was an oversight by Apple developers, who put the address in as a placeholder and then forgot to revise it. The site happens to be the official search directory for domains that carry the .xxx top level domain, which was created last year. As a result, the iTunes section briefly featured a smorgasbord of pornographic images. Apple quickly fixed the mishap, but has yet to explain how it happened. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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SpaceX gets its first military contract

The iconic “blue marble” picture of Earth, taken during the Apollo missions, will be a regular feature of the DSCOVR hardware NASA SpaceX announced that it had won two big US Air Force launch contracts Wednesday. If successful, the two demonstrations would help them qualify to compete for Air Force business against launch provider ULA (United Launch Alliance), which currently has a stranglehold on the largest Air Force launches. The first launch, planned for a Falcon 9, will send up the long-awaited NASA DSCOVR satellite to a distant point between the Sun and the Earth, where it can look at the Earth with the Sun behind it. The second, a Falcon Heavy launch, will put up several satellites and a 5 metric ton ballast, in an effort to demonstrate the Falcon 9 Heavy for the Air Force. Both contracts fall under the Air Force’s OSP-3 (Orbital/Suborbital) program, an Air Force program specifically designed to bringing in new launch companies. “GoreSat” rises from storage DSCOVR, NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory , has been in deep storage since 2001, when it was imprisoned by the incoming Bush Administration. DSCOVR is designed to measure the Earth’s albedo by tracking sunlight reflected back from the Earth from a distant vantage point. Former Vice-President Al Gore suggested that a video camera be installed on the satellite, with the hope that the constant video feed of the distant Earth would provide the same kind of ” Blue Marble ” perspective that the first pictures from Apollo did. The original Blue Marble picture is probably the most-circulated picture in human history, and is widely credited with contributing to the start of the modern ecology movement. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8 sales are good, if not great, at 40 million copies in the first month

Tami Reller, corporate vice president (and chief financial officer and chief marketing officer) for Windows and Windows Live, announced today that Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses after its first month of retail availability. Is that number good, bad, or merely mediocre? Probably good, but perhaps not great. Microsoft sold 60 million copies of Windows 7 in the first ten weeks of that operating system’s availability, with the Wall Street Journal estimating that 40 million copies were sold in the first month. With Windows 8 selling 40 million copies in five weeks, it seems to be selling at about the same pace as Windows 7. Considering the different market dynamics—Windows 7 was an iterative release that fulfilled substantial pent-up demand as businesses chose to ignore Windows Vista whereas Windows 8 is a more controversial update being brought to a market that is generally happy with Windows 7 anyway—this is a healthy performance. Windows 7 sold very well and matching it is no mean feat. The apparent failure to surpass Windows 7’s launch could explain the mixed reports on early sales. Strong sales can still be disappointing if they were expected to be stronger still. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Review: 3M Streaming Projector is good, but not perfect

What happens when you combine a 4.3 x 4.2 x 2 inch projector with a wealth of streaming content services? You get the handheld, portable Streaming Projector by 3M and Roku. The two companies have teamed up to offer the best of each of their worlds in one compact package. While overall it’s a useful device, it does have a couple of kinks that need to be worked out. The 3M Streaming Projector is a neat idea, especially in a world overrun by set-top boxes. Pocket projectors have been around for a while now, so this isn’t an entirely new concept. But rather than having to connect the projector to an external device—like a smartphone or computer, the included Roku streaming stick provides the content. The projector also features dual-band Wi-Fi, so it has the same functionality as a Roku box, though its output is blown up all over the wall. Design The projector is rated at 60 lumens. The 3M Streaming Projector is easy to cart around. It’s small enough stick in a laptop bag or a purse to bring over to a friend’s house. The device features two volume buttons, as well as buttons to power on the device, sift through settings, and check on things like battery power and brightness. On one side of the projector, there’s a plug for the power supply, as well as an audio out to plug in headphones or an external speaker system. On the other side, there’s a wheel to adjust the focus of the picture to ensure that movies and slide shows aren’t blurry. The Streaming Projector can be mounted on a tripod via a ventral screw-hole, should there be a lack of tables high enough to properly display the picture on a blank wall. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: 3M Streaming Projector is good, but not perfect

Amazon floats Windows Server 2012 into AWS cloud

Amazon Web Services announced today that it will now offer virtual Windows 2012 server instances as part of its Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Amazon Web Services’ Windows team General Manager Tom Rizzo—who until this June was Microsoft’s Senior Director for the Office and Office 365 teams, and had previously run Microsoft’s SharePoint team—revealed the addition of the Server 2012 platform in a post on the AWS team’s official blog . As Ars found in our review of Windows Server 2012 , the operating system has a number of advantages for cloud users over previous Windows Server operating systems, including better software-defined networking and improved remote configuration through PowerShell commands. Amazon is hardly the first to offer Server 2012 as a public cloud service—Microsoft’s Azure and a number of smaller cloud providers have had Server 2012 instances available since the operating system was released (and in some cases, before that). But there are a number of things that Amazon has done with Windows 2012 that are sure to draw attention from companies and developers looking to ease into using Server 2012 or go big right away. One is Amazon’s support for Server 2012 in AWS’s Elastic Beanstalk , a service that automatically takes care of many of the deployment and capacity-provisioning aspects of deploying an application to the AWS cloud. Amazon is also offering Server 2012 as part of its “free” tier of services as well—up to 750 hours of EC2 “Micro Instance” compute time per month, for up to a year. There’s also direct integration into Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 through the AWS Explorer Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal a mix of promise, pain

Tux shares a perch with Ubuntu 12.10’s namesake bird Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Write this down: Ubuntu 12.10, the late-year arrival from Canonical’s six-month standard release factory, marks the first new release within the company’s current long-term support cycle. Got it? Good, because it may be the best takeaway from the latest Ubuntu release, codenamed Quantal Quetzal. After that, it’s a bit of a rocky ride. The product’s development lineage is important to note from more of a business/adoption side perspective. The release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in April was Canonical’s fourth long-term support product and signaled the end of one full two-year development cycle. Quantal Quetzal is the first standard release on the road to pushing out Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in Spring 2014 (undoubtedly to be codenamed “Uber-rocking Unicorn” if the pattern holds), and it sets up themes and directions which will mature over the next two years. Standard releases aren’t terribly different from the bi-annual LTS products, though they tend to be slightly less conservative in code offerings. The Ubuntu development community lets off the brakes a little and sticks some shiny back in. Read 63 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal a mix of promise, pain

Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

As of Monday, well-known BitTorrent tracker Demonoid is back online . Three months ago, the tenacious tracker was chased out of its Ukrainian host, likely under pressure from American authorities. It may also have been driven offline due to a denial of service attack. According to the IP address linked to the tracker, the new host appears to be physically located in Hong Kong . The website, meanwhile, remains down. TorrentFreak points out that in previous closures, Demonoid’s tracker appeared before its website came back online, indicating that the site’s return may be coming soon. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Notorious BitTorrent tracker Demonoid back online, website still down

Kim Dotcom has new “Mega” domain, says this one won’t be shut down

After the government of Gabon shut down his Me.ga domain , Kim Dotcom needed a new country to let him host the domain that will be home to the successor of file-sharing site Megaupload. That country will be New Zealand, as Dotcom is now the owner of Mega.co.nz . The exact same site that was originally hosted at Me.ga can now be found at the New Zealand domain. On Twitter, Dotcom announced “New Zealand will be the home of our new website: http://Mega.co.nz – Powered by legality and protected by the law.” When Gabon shut down Me.ga, Dotcom blamed “the reach of the US and Vivendi,” as the Me.ga domain was provided by Gabon Telecom, a subsidiary of the Vivendi entertainment company. Although New Zealand police raided Dotcom’s house 10 months ago because of criminal copyright charges filed against him in the US, he seems confident that New Zealand won’t shut down the domain itself. Ultimately, getting a domain will probably be among the least challenging aspects of running Mega, which is expected to launch in January. But Dotcom has a plan for that too. To avoid copyright charges, Dotcom promises Mega “encrypts and decrypts your data transparently in your browser, on the fly,” and that the encryption keys are only controlled by the user, not Mega. And to avoid the reach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Dotcom plans to run his servers with hosting services outside the US. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Kim Dotcom has new “Mega” domain, says this one won’t be shut down

Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders

ax2groin On Tuesday, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 35, which ratcheted up penalties for those convicted of sex crimes, including human trafficking. The proposition included a provision requiring registered sex offenders to disclose to law enforcement all of their Internet connections and online identities. On Wednesday, two of the 73,900 registered sex offenders in the state who would be affected by the law filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of these provisions. The two plaintiffs argued that forcing them to expose their online identities would violate their First Amendment right to speak anonymously. Their appeal is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Late on Wednesday, Judge Thelton Henderson granted a temporary restraining order barring the law from going into effect until he had time to consider the plaintiffs’ constitutional arguments. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders