Author: Nick Farrell

LG kills off Plasma TVs

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

additional-oxford-dodo-bookLG will end the production of plasma display televisions by end-November in order to focus its efforts on liquid crystal display and OLED televisions.

LG Electronics said in a regulatory filing the decision reflects a decline in demand for plasma televisions. The move was widely expected as LCD TVs have become the mainstay product in the global market while Plasma has become the Betamax of the telly world.

It is not the only company that thinks that plasma is a Norwegian Blue. Samsung SDI, a sister company of LG’s TV rival Samsung , also said in July that it will shut down its plasma panel production business by Nov. 30 due to the decline in overall demand.

The first prototype for a plasma display monitor was invented in July 1964 at the University of Illinois by professors Donald Bitzer and Gene Slottow. However, it was not until after the advent of digital and other technologies that successful plasma televisions became possible. Plasma display is an emissive flat panel display where light is created by phosphors excited by a plasma discharge between two flat panels of glass.

While many companies have successfully manufactured different sizes of plasma displays through early 2000, during 2006 through 2008, Panasonic came out with a 103 inch plasma display, which is the third largest display of plasma in the world, and it was marketed by Jumbo Electronics in Dubai.

By 2006 plasma TVs were overtaken by the LCDs, but in the 40-inch series and above slice, plasma displays had established the control over the market share. It was considered that LCD technology was most suited to small size televisions only while the plasma technology was highly competitive in larger sizes, especially in 40-inches and above.

That changed as bigger LCD screens proved just as good and cheaper.

 

Amazon burnt by Fire

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

FireOnTheAmazonPosterAmazon has admitted that it has lost a pile of dosh on its Fire smartphone.

Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak confessed to investors that the company took a $170 million charge related to the write-down of costs associated with its smartphone.

The smartphone was supposed to be one branch of Amazon’s expanding family tree of devices, which has grown from a single e-reader to tablets, a media-streaming box and the smartphone.

The company last week  reported a third-quarter loss that significantly widened over a year ago and missed Wall Street expectations, while warning that its fourth-quarter revenue would also disappoint. The Fire Phone charge was a large component of the $437 million lost in the period.

But the Fire Phone, its first foray into the smartphone business, was supposed to do to Amazon what its tablet had done.  Make piles of dosh by forcing people to buy its content.  The phone itself was not bad either with some technology which should have helped it elbow its way into the market. It could display 3D images and graphics and scan certain products and media for additional information and purchasing options.

Where Amazon went wrong was that it did not subsidise the phone in the same way that it had done for its Fire Tablet. Even with an exclusive partnership with wireless carrier AT&T in the US. The phone has failed to make a dent in the market, and after two months, went from $200 to 99 cents with a two-year contract. In the UK it’s free on various contracts from the O2 network.

The exclusive deal with AT&T in the US did not help either. Most high-profile smartphones opt to go with multiple carriers, but Amazon tied itself to AT&T in exchange for more prominent promotional positioning in the carrier’s shops.  However that did not explain why it also tanked in the UK.

ARM claims new Mali will be smoking

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

Bob_Marley__Smoking_Blighty chip designer ARM claims that its new Mali chips will offer both higher performance and higher energy efficiency. The top-end Mali-T860, for instance, supports 4K graphics and beyond while “being 45 percent more energy efficient across a wide range of content” compared to ARM’s current offerings.

The new GPUs include the high-end Mali-T860 GPU, the Mali-T830 GPU, and the Mali-T820 GPU. ARM is also introducing the Mali-V550 video processor and the Mali-DP550 display processor chip, which a coprocessor interface and support for 7 layer composition.

ARM said that the Mali-T860 is 45 percent more energy efficient across a wide range of content. It can support 4K graphics and beyond. Each processor is tuned to a different mobile submarket.

ARM claims its silicon will make it from drawing board to device far faster than before and there will be lots of them ranging from low end to high spec chips.

Currently, ARM Mali GPU designs are used by 60 partners and there were more than 400 million Mali GPUs shipping in 2013 alone.

Apple CEO furious at shops

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

tim-cook-glareApple CEO Tim Cook is furious that shops are not using his Apple Pay system and are thinking of setting up their own payment schemes.

CVS and Rite Aid gave Apple Pay the thumbs down in favour of a rival system that roughly 50 chains, including Wal-Mart and Best Buy, are developing for in-house use.
Apple touted Apple Pay as one of the reasons you needed to buy one of its expensive bendy phones and told its fan boy base that they would be able to shop in most places by waving their phones at bored cashiers.

Unfortunately, for Cook, his cunning plan required retailers to pay fees to card companies like Visa and Mastercard. Fees range between two percent and three percent of costs per transaction and it would seem unnecessary if retailers used their own system.

Cook argued on Monday that Apple Pay offered better security and privacy than competing services, and that retailers risked alienating customers by limiting choices at checkout.
“It’s a skirmish,” Cook said in response to a question about the retailers’ moves.

“Merchants have different objectives sometimes. But in the long arc of time, you only are relevant as a retailer or merchant if your customers love you.”

In other words if the retailers do not do what Apple tells them, people who own its phones will shop elsewhere.

Of course the Tame Apple press is doing its best to help. Rather than telling fanboys that no shop is going to be impressed with them waving their flaccid bendy phone at them, it is instead trying to talk up the failing Apple Pay system. This is mostly done by publishing Apple sourced figures about the number of people signing up to Apple Pay  to put pressure on retailers to do Cook’s bidding.

US spectrum launch delayed

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

LPSpectrumThe chance of the US leading the world when it comes to hi-spec mobile networks were put on ice by its regulatory authority.

The FCC has delayed the incentive auction and has prompted the agency to push the spectrum swap until 2016 thanks to a legal challenge.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) started the court case because the incentive auction could hurt TV stations that choose not to participate in the auction.

Final briefs in the case are not due until late January 2015, meaning a decision is probably not likely until mid-2015.

An FCC spokesman said it was confident it wouldl prevail in court, but given the reality of that schedule, the complexity of designing and implementing the auction, and the need for all auction participants to have certainty well in advance of the auction, a delay is necessary.

The spectrum auction will allow broadcasters to sell their unused spectrum to mobile carriers and get a cut of the purchase price. NAB has been cautiously supportive of the move, but the group’s lawsuit says that the FCC is not providing adequate protection for broadcasters who decline to participate.

NAB said it was not its narrowly focused lawsuit which was the cause for delay. NAB Executive Vice President of Communications Dennis Wharton said the  NAB has said repeatedly, it is more important to get the auction done right than right now. Given its complexity, there is good reason Congress gave the FCC 10 years to complete the proceeding.

CHiPs steal nude pictures in car arrests

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

ss3399539_-chipsUS traffic cops  (CHiPs) have been using mobile search laws to steal naked pictures of hot women they er pull over.

According to an East Bay California Highway Patrol officer, accused of stealing nude photos of a DUI suspect claimed officers have stolen images for years.

Officer Sean Harrington of Martinez confessed to stealing explicit photos from the suspect’s phone, and said he forwarded those images to at least two other CHP officers.

Harrington called the photo stealing a “game” and said he had done the same thing to female arrestees a “half dozen times in the last several years.”

His reasoning is that others were doing it so why should he be the only one punished.

Photos were discovered missing when a suspect said she synced her phone after her arrest and noticed when six photos were sent from her phone to another account.

Richard Madsen, the victim’s attorney said that the pictures were private and should not be seen by anyone.

In a written statement to KPIX 5, CHP Commissioner Joseph Farrow said, “The allegations anger and disgust me. We expect the highest levels of integrity and moral strength from everyone in the California Highway Patrol and there is no place in our organization for such behaviour.”

What would Ponch say?

 

A load of meatballs? Italians might get free wi-fi

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

Spaghetti_and_meatballs_(cropped)The Italian government has come up with a novel way of fixing its aging and creaking broadband – it is going to introduce free wi-fi for tourists.

Italy has a problem in that its fixed line system is run by Telecom Italia which is broke and can’t afford to make any changes. The Telco is pretty much a monopoly which does not sit well with regulators.  At the same time no one really wants to fix it because that would take time and money.  Meanwhile there are American tourists shouting in the middle of Roma that they can’t stream their movies to their loved ones back in the Land of the Free.

Italian MPs’ answer is to provide free Wi-Fi in thousands of public places where foreigners are likely to hang out.  People will still not get it in their homes, but if they nip down to the local square with their mobile they might get a connection, along with a loud bloke wearing a Hawaiian shirt who is telling everyone how old the buildings are.

Under the plan, large shops, taxis, airports, law courts and other public places would have to set up an Internet connection and offer no-password wireless access free.

The plan is being pushed by Sergio Boccadutri, a member of the ruling Democratic Party  and has the backing of 100 MPs.

“Free Wi-Fi would have a big cultural impact and help the economy recover, starting from industries such as tourism.”

It will cost $6.3 million over three years as a contribution to buying equipment. The proposers aim to bring the bill before parliament by mid-2015.

In a recent study, penetration of broadband services with a speed exceeding 30 Megabits per second in Italy is lower than 1 percent, well below the European average of 6 percent.

Amazon is an illusion claims mystic Ballmer

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

SteveBallmerMouthAgapeIt seems that since he has left Microsoft, the shy and retiring former Vole Steve “there is a kind of hush” Ballmer has been taking some time out to consider the nature of reality.

Now when Buddha hit the same level in his meditations, he concluded that death and suffering was all an illusion, but Ballmer contemplated his navel, he concluded that the online retailer Amazon is not real.

Sharing his spiritual realisations on the Charlie Rose Show, Ballmer said that he didn’t  know what to say about Amazon before explaining why he’s wary of the company.

He said that the company made no money and in his world, you’re not a real business until you make some money.

“I have a hard time with businesses that don’t make money at some point.”

Amazon came up short of analyst expectations and on Thursday posted a $437 million loss for the third quarter, or a loss of 95 cents a share. That followed a net loss of $126 million during the second quarter. Its stock has fallen eight percent today as a result.

Ballmer said it’s OK for a company not to make money for a few years, but he’s perplexed with Amazon, which had yet to post a profit in two decades.

“If you are worth $150 billion, eventually somebody thinks you’re going to make $15 billion pre tax,” Ballmer said. “They make about zero, and there’s a big gap between zero and 15.”

Ballmer said that every business is expected to have is the capability to make money, and it requires  discipline and a certain kind of mindset.

“As a businessman, if you ask me what I’m proud of, I’m proud of the fact that I made $250 billion under my watch as CEO.”

So St Steve still has a problem working out that materiality is also an illusion.

Apple and Google Play blocked

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

onedollarIt is starting to look like the numbers of retailers who back Apple, Google pay is shrinking rather than growing, and that US retailers are rushing to set up their own system instead.

When Apple launched Apple Pay in September, the list of retailers who backed it was long, but in the weeks following the launch, some major retailers have blocked it in favour of a competing option set to debut in 2015.

Apple Pay was operational at NFC terminals at Rite Aid and CVS, both non-Apple Pay partners, but was reportedly disabled over the course of the last 48 hours.

A CVS employee said that the company disabled NFC payments over the weekend which would also prevent Google Wallet users from using NFC payments.

A leaked memo, revealed on Friday by Slashgear, suggested that the retailers have decided they want nothing to do with Apple Pay and are working with a group of large retailers to develop a mobile wallet that allows for mobile payments attached to credit cards and bank accounts directly from a smart phone. We expect to have this feature available in the first half of 2015.

The new payment system mentioned in the alleged leaked Rite Aid memo is a solution developed by Merchant Customer Exchange  called CurrentC. Other confirmed major retailers included in the system will be CVS, Kmart, Sears, Target, Walmart, Best Buy and 7 Eleven, the cream of the crop of mainstream retailers in the US.

The Tame Apple Press is screaming blue murder at the scheme which is likely to allow merchants to avoid paying credit card processing fees and give them more information about customers.  Everyone knows that this sort of data should be in the hands of technology companies rather than retailers.

But what this means is that Apple Pay may have the traction that the Tame Apple Press claimed.

Apple apologist hack hit by instant karma

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

burke

Samuel Burke

Just when you thought that Apple’s super bendy, overpriced, low spec iPhone 6 could not be a bigger lemon, it turns out that using its Pay function will cost you an arm and a leg.

It seems that not just the design geniuses at Apple need firing for the iPhone 6, but the programmers should also get a written warning and a lecture from HR.

Jobs’ Mob’ much over praised Apple Pay double charges users for no apparent reason. Multiple users have reported being charged twice for a single purchase when using the new NFC-based mobile payments system, which just went live on October 20.

Fortunately, at least one person who suffered from having their bank accounts emptied by their shiny toys were the same people who had been praising it to the skies when the iPhone 6 was launched.

The Tame Apple Press’s appropriately named CNN Tech reporter Samuel Burke  who rushed to Apple’s defence during bendgate by insisting that the iPhone 6 did  not bend found himself dealing with some instant karma for telling people about how brilliant the product was.

Burke moaned he was billed twice for every Apple Pay purchase he made with his Bank of America card via Apple Pay. Multiple Twitter users reported the same problem, and most complaints are coming from those Bank of America cards.

The Bank of America claims that the problem is with Apple Pay and not the bank, according to Burke’s report, and said in a statement that all duplicate charges will be reimbursed.

Apple of course trotted out its usual line that only a small number of users were affected and insisted it was a Bank of America problem.

Tech firm paid IT workers $1.21 an hour

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Oliver_Twist_-_Samhällsroman_-_Sida_005A San Jose based outfit, Electronics for Imaging paid several employees from India as little as $1.21 an hour to help install computer systems at the company’s Fremont headquarters.

The highly skilled workers, who could have earned more cash by sitting with a cup and dog on a string in the high street, worked up to 122 hours a week between September 8, 2013, and December 21, 2013.

Investigators from the division’s US Labour Department’s wage and hour division learned that the technicians were flown in from the employer’s office in Bangalore, India. The workers were paid in Indian rupees.

Susana Blanco, district director said: “We are not going to tolerate this kind of behaviour from employers.”

The $1.21 an hour was the lowest wage paid to workers that Blanco said she was aware of in the Northern California district. The record had been held by Bloom Energy which was ordered to pay back wages to 12 workers from Mexico who were being paid $2.66 an hour in Mexican pesos. The workers were repairing power generators.

Sylvia Allegretto, a UC Berkeley research economist and co-chair of the university’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics told the Mercury News that it was amazing that employers believed they could get away with this.

An anonymous tip prompted the US Department of Labour to investigate the case, which resulted in more than $40,000 in back wages paid to the eight employees and a fine of $3,500 for Electronics for Imaging.

Electronics for Imaging said it brought some IT employees from India temporarily to help its local IT team with the relocation.

Beverly Rubin, vice president of HR Shared Services with Electronics for Imaging said that during this assignment, they continued to be paid their regular pay in India, as well as a special bonus for their efforts on this project.

“During this process we unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local US standards.”

The back wages were based on the difference between the $1.21 an hour that was paid and the California minimum wage of $8 an hour, she said. The entire $40,156 in back wages was distributed directly to the eight affected workers.

So an IT worker is hired at the same rate as someone who flips burgers.  Even at that rate, it is still economic for a company to bring in workers from India.

Google hires Oxford boffins to provide AI

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

oxford-robesGoogle is finding itself a little short on intelligence and has been seen snuffling around near the Oxford headquarters of TechEye.

When cornered, near one of the wheelie bins at the back of public house the Kite, a Google staffer explained that the search engine was expanding its artificial intelligence initiative. Apparently, they are hiring more than half a dozen leading academics and experts in the field and announcing a partnership with Oxford University to “accelerate” its efforts.

Apparently, Google will make a “substantial contribution” to establish a research partnership with Oxford’s computer science and engineering departments, and Oxford will return the favour by holding one of its famous dinners.

Google did not provide any financial details about the partnership, saying only in a post on its blog that it will include a program of student internships and a series of joint lectures and workshops “to share knowledge and expertise.”

Google is building up its artificial intelligence capabilities as it strives to maintain its dominance in the Internet search market and to develop new products such as robotics and self-driving cars. In January Google acquired artificial intelligence company Deep Mind for $400 million according to media reports.

The Oxford boffins will be joining Google’s Deep Mind team, including three artificial intelligence experts whose work has focused on improving computer visual recognition systems. Among that team is Oxford Professor Andrew Zisserman, a three-time winner of the Marr Prize for computer vision.

The four founders of Dark Blue Labs will also be joining Google where they will be will be leading efforts to help machines “better understand what users are saying to them.”

Google said that three of the professors will hold joint appointments at Oxford, continuing to work part time at the university.

 

Microsoft says it is still researching

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

2007_7young-frankensteinMicrosoft has not given up on research and development, despite closing its Silicon Valley lab.

Writing in his bog, Harry Shum, Executive Vice President, Technology & Research said that the recent shuttering of the Silicon Valley lab really hurt.

He said that no one at Microsoft felt good about the fact that a significant number of friends and colleagues were laid off.

“These people contributed to the success of Microsoft over many years. As one can readily imagine, the decisions made about how the cuts were implemented within MSR were extremely complicated and personally painful,” Shum said.

There had been some concern in the wider technology community that Microsoft would walk away from the huge amounts of research work it has done. However, Shum said that the closures did not mean that Vole had given up on inventing stuff.

“Microsoft Research still stands strong at 1000+ persons in labs worldwide, making it one of the largest research institutions of its kind in the world, either industrial or academic, “he said.

“Microsoft Research continues to be one of the very few organisations in industry that does true academic style open research. We will continue to collaborate with the academic research community not only in moving forward the state of the art in computing but also in developing computing talent around the world,” he added.

Microsoft results better than expected

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

SmaugMicrosoft reported higher than expected quarterly revenue, helped by stronger sales of its phones, Surface tablets and cloud-computing products for companies.

The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had been a little concerned that Microsoft might  suffer from am industry shift toward lower-margin cloud services.

Redmond shares, which have climbed 33 percent over the past year, rose another three percent in after-hours trading. You can pick up a good used share, with low mileage, for $46.36.

The Volish results fly in the face of negative earnings results from tech bellwethers Oracle, IBM, SAP, VMware, and EMC.

Big Blue’s miserable results were expected to be repeated by Microsoft  as all of them had made tentative inroads into the cloud, which generally yields thinner margins.

Microsoft did not disclose its cloud-based revenue for the fiscal first quarter, but said commercial cloud sales rose 128 percent, while sales of services based on its Azure cloud platform rose 121 percent.

Perhaps more importantly, it said gross profit margin in the unit that includes Azure rose 194 percent, despite rising infrastructure costs, which includes the huge expense of building and operating datacenters.

In the last four years, Microsoft’s gross profit margin has drifted down to about 65 percent from above 80 percent, largely due to its move into tablets and phones.

Microsoft is predicted to make $6 billion a year in cloud revenue soon, which would make it the industry’s largest cloud. However would still be only about six percent of overall expected revenue this fiscal year.

CEO Satya Nadella, in a conference call with analysts, said that Microsoft was the only company with cloud revenue that is growing at triple digit rates.

Nadella was keen to stress that Microsoft is more focused on selling higher-margin services via the cloud to its commercial customers.

Microsoft’s fiscal first quarter profit actually fell 13 percent, largely due to an expected $1.1 billion charge related to mass layoffs announced in July.

However it still collected a profit of $4.5 billion compared with $5.2 billion, or 62 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter. It easily beat Wall Street’s forecasts.

Revenue rose 25 percent to $23.2 billion, thanks to the phone business it bought from Nokia in April.  Lumia smartphones sales hit 9.3 million in the first full quarter since the close of the Nokia deal. Sales of the Surface tablet more than doubled to $908 million from $400 million last year.

 

 

Microsoft bricks Scottish FTDI clones

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

kirkhillyard2Hardware hackers building interactive gadgets based on Arduino microcontrollers are finding that a recent driver update that Microsoft deployed over Windows Update has bricked fake FTDI chips.

The Scottish outfit FTDI makes USB-to-serial chips.  They are very popular and every microcontroller and embedded device out there that can communicate over a serial port uses one. As a result there’s a vast number of knock-off chips in the wild that appear to be made by FTDI, but in fact aren’t.

FTDI develops drivers for its chips which are obtained directly from FTDI, or they can be downloaded by Windows automatically, through Windows Update. But the latest version of FTDI’s driver, released in August, contains some new language in its EULA reprograms counterfeit chips rendering them largely unusable. According to its license:

Use of the Software as a driver for, or installation of the Software onto, a component that is not a Genuine FTDI Component, including without limitation counterfeit components, may irretrievably damage that component.

Of course no one reads the licence, which is stored inside the driver files, but at least the owners of cloned chips were warned.

What is also happening though is that developers who thought that they had bought legitimate FTDI parts are suddenly discovering that their supplier has been ignoring design specs and using knock-offs.

The new driver reprograms the PID of counterfeit chips to 0000 which means that necause this PID does not match any real FTDI part, the FTDI drivers no longer recognise the chips, and block access. This PID is stored in persistent memory, so once a chip has been reprogrammed it will continue to show this 0000 PID even when used with older drivers, or even when used with Linux.

FTDI has recovery software that enables chips to be reprogrammed, and when used with some older drivers, it appears to be possible to reinstate the “correct” PID. If the chips are ever used with the recent drivers, however, their PID will once again be set to 0000.

While there is some amount of sympathy for a hardware company that is having its products so widely cloned, there is a great sense that FTDI has gone too far by rendering them inoperable.

More here http://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/ftdi-driver-kills-fake-ftdi-ft232/.