TechEye |  |
- HTC and Samsung report strong flagship shipments
- Don't fear floating space brains
- Panel clears "cold fusion" device
- HP starts to improve
- Paul Allen cuts an album
- Lenovo reports record shipments, market share
- SAP hunts for autistic workers
- Google is a country, not a company
- Wackypedia admits pagan purge
- Oxford: Actually, Steve, it's "gif" or "jif"
| HTC and Samsung report strong flagship shipments Posted: 23 May 2013 04:56 AM PDT The smartphone wars are heating up and now we are hearing that Samsung and HTC flagship Android phones are flying off the shelves, leaving the competition in a cloud of dust. Samsung has managed to ship 10 million Galaxy S4s over the last month or so, making the S4 the fastest selling Samsung phone of all time. It easily trumps the S III, which took 50 days to hit the 10 million milestone, and the S II, which took five months. It is an impressive result to say the least, although Samsung’s arch-nemesis Apple shipped 37.4 million iPhones in the first quarter. However, HTC is fighting back and the underdog is doing quite well. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Taiwanese outfit has sold around 5 million units of the HTC One. Despite internal turmoil and horrific financial results over the past few quarters, HTC seems to be putting up quite a fight. The HTC One might be the company’s last chance to stay relevant and it appears to be performing admirably. Apple remains the big unknown at this point. Cupertino is expected to roll out a new iPhone over the next few months, along with a cheaper, plastic version of the iPhone for emerging markets. However, it might not be enough to stop the Android juggernaut. |
| Don't fear floating space brains Posted: 23 May 2013 04:52 AM PDT Scientists have put to bed a theory about space brains, which will be a great relief to those who have trouble sleeping over such matters. According to the New Scientist there are physicists who claim that there is good evidence that a legion of floating space brains are not spontaneously bursting into existence throughout the universe. For the last decade it was postulated that space might be full of floating brains, which were dubbed Boltzmann brains. The idea was that since space was jolly big, there was a likelihood that consciousness big enough to form a brain could evolve. These space brains, made out of different components of space matter would float around the galaxy doing whatever brains do, and certainly not inventing reality television. One scientist, who clearly did not get out enough, worked out that most physics theories would come unstuck if the number of space brains was higher than those of human brains. If Boltzmann brains outnumber humans, then theories of space and time will be compromised because humanity would no longer be 'typical' observers. Instead the watchers of the universe might be these space brains who might perceive things a little different from us. For example, instead of heaven and hell, they might perceive religion as being an itch which is impossible to scratch because they don't have hands. Fortunately, according to the New Scientist, there are physicists who claim that there is good evidence that a legion of floating space brains are not spontaneously bursting into existence throughout the universe. New understandings of string theory and the theory of multiple universes might just save us from wasting our time worrying about space brains. Physicists Claire Zukowski and Raphael Buosso at Berkely say that the key to this balance between human and space brains is whether or not universes expand forever and linger for much longer than creatures like humans can survive. However, using two models of the universe it now seems less likely that reality as we know it is dominated by space superbrains. So now you can all get some sleep knowing that we are still the best observers of the universe that we know of. |
| Panel clears "cold fusion" device Posted: 23 May 2013 03:35 AM PDT A panel of researchers has released a paper confirming that a device made by a secretive Italian might be cold fusion. The paper, penned by a team of independent scientists, has yet to receive a peer review, but appears to suggest that Andrea Rossi's cold fusion device might be the business. The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline. The paper said that even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than petrol which is the best fuel readily available to mankind. According to Extreme Tech, Rossi has been claiming for the past two years that he had cracked cold fusion with his devise dubbed the Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat). He has not won any friends in the scientific community by letting them independently analyse the device, at least before he turned the gear over to the panel. Even now, while the boffins had a fairly free rein while testing the E-Cat, they could not work out what was going on inside the sealed steel cylinder reactor. The team of seven scientists, all from European universities, obviously felt confident enough with their findings. Rossi and his chum Sergio Focardi have previously said their device works by infusing hydrogen into nickel, transmuting the nickel into copper and releasing a large amount of heat. Hydrogen ions are sucked into a nickel lattice and the nickel's electrons are forced into the hydrogen to produce neutrons. The nickel nuclei absorb these neutrons; the neutrons are stripped of their electrons to become protons; and thus the nickel goes up in atomic number from 28 to 29, becoming copper. All this produces a lot of heat - something like 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen, but does not create ionizing radiation or radioactive waste. If Rossi's idea pans out then it really could change the world dramatically. |
| Posted: 23 May 2013 03:21 AM PDT It looks like whatever its new CEO Meg Whitman is doing at HP to turn the outfit around is starting to work. The maker of expensive printer ink raised its 2013 earnings outlook after quarterly results beat low expectations. Analysts believe that Whitman's turnaround plan helped offset falling PC sales by boosting enterprise computing services. It was not all good news, in fact, if the company had not been in Dire Straits playing back up for Mark Knopfler in the first place then people would be saying the announcement was rubbish. HP's fiscal second-quarter profit fell 32 percent, but since the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had expected a lot worse, it all looked like a victory. HP shares gained 14 percent after the company projected full-year earnings per share of $3.50 to $3.60, raising the lower end by 10 cents, and fiscal third-quarter profit that topped analyst estimates. Still it is being seen as a feather in the cap of Whitman, who took the helm at the world's largest PC maker more than a year ago. She wants to recapture some of HP's former strong growth. To be fair she did say the process could take years. HP's chief financial officer Cathie Lesjak was so excited when she talked to Reuters that she mixed her metaphors and came up with something unpleasant. She said that this was a "another good deposit on the road to our turnaround here". When we were living in Slough there was a homeless fellow who regularly left a good deposit on the road next to the roundabout. Enterprise services and printing units are "probably a little bit ahead," she said, adding the two businesses helped drive the company's gross margin improvement during the quarter. HP's net income fell to $1.08 billion from $1.59 billion a year ago. Other analysts were not so certain that things were getting great at HP. Tom Reuner, principal analyst at Ovum said that HP's Q2 2013 financial results are a reminder that, as its CEO Meg Whitman is reiterating, that the restructuring will take a further four years. Slightly beating HP's guidance should not be misunderstood as a turnaround but as an improvement in its operational efficiency. "Margin improvement and an improved guidance for the rest of the year are a sign that the restructuring measures are starting to show results. Equally an improvement in Printing and Enterprise Services is contributing to a stabilising of HP's performance," he said. The company needs to refine its communications around how it will differentiate around these industry trends. The structural challenges around the low margin PC business and the transformation to a software and services led organisation still persist, Reuner said. |
| Posted: 23 May 2013 03:17 AM PDT No one can say that Microsoft Paul Allen has not done a lot with his life. He has been a philanthropist, inventor, investor, cancer survivor and author. Yesterday he tweeted that he is going to become a recording artist and put out an album. Allen shared the Amazon link to his first album on twitter. Apparenly he recorded the disk alongside his band, the Underthinkers. The album contains 13 tracks, "Everything at Once" features celebrity guests including Joe Walsh, Derek Trucks, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Chrissie Hynde, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Ivan Neville. Every song on the album is either written or co-written by Allen himself. He said that he will not make any money from the project. He's not looking to add to his great fortune with the proceeds; all of the money that the album makes is being donated to the EMP technology museum. You can order the album now, but it will actually be released in August. |
| Lenovo reports record shipments, market share Posted: 23 May 2013 03:15 AM PDT Lenovo has pulled it off again. Although most PC peddlers are in the red, the company reported record PC shipments, annual sales, global market share and annual pre-tax income. In its fiscal fourth quarter, ending 31 March, Lenovo reported sales of $34 billion, up 15 percent year-on-year, as well as a record full-year pre tax income of $801 million, up 38 percent over the previous year. Better yet, Lenovo’s market share shot up to 15.5 percent for the full year. Quarterly revenue was up four percent year-on-year, at $7.8 billion, with a 63 percent increase in pre-tax profit. Over the past 12 months the company’s PC shipments grew 10.2 percent, compared to an overall industry decline of 8.1 percent during the same period. Lenovo beat the industry for the 16th quarter in a row, and as if that wasn’t enough, it is aggressively expanding into post-PC markets. It now has a 5.9 percent share of the smart connected device market, ranking third worldwide. Although Lenovo smartphones are something of an oddity in the West, China is gobbling them up. It has also stepped up its game in the tablet market, although it still has a long way to go before it matches its PC success. |
| SAP hunts for autistic workers Posted: 23 May 2013 01:45 AM PDT The company which makes software that no one understands says it aims to train 650 workers with autism to become IT specialists by 2020. According to the Manchester Guardian, SAP said that it will provide job coaches to act as mediators between autistic workers and their colleagues. In a statement, the company said that it wanted to find workers that "think different", and will recruit hundreds of people with autism within the next few years. The figure amounts to one percent of the corporation's multinational workforce. It will match the proportion of the world's population that has the condition. SAP said that it had already started the project in India and Ireland where a total of 11 people with autism are employed. It now wants the programme to take on software testers, programmers and data management and workers will spread across Germany, Canada and the US this year. Autism is a neural development disorder that often undermines a person’s ability to communicate and interact socially. Their brains process information differently to most people and they can end up carrying out repetitive and restricted behaviour. While this is not considered helpful in other aspects of life, in the world of computers the tendencies they often display such as an obsession for detail and an ability to analyse long sets of data very accurately can translate into highly useful and marketable skills. That doesn't apply to journalists. The move has been welcomed by Germany's largest organisation for people with autism, Autismus Deutschland, which said that it would be monitoring the situation carefully to see that the workers are not exploited. Around 20 percent of people with milder forms of autism such as Asperger's Syndrome and high-functioning autism are in work. SAP will provide job coaches who will act as mediators between the workers and their employers and colleagues and help with communication or the stresses of working under time pressure. Certainly you need your brain rewired to understand this quote from Peter Graf, the executive VP of Sustainability Solutions at SAP: "Sustainability is about holistically managing economic, environmental and social risks and opportunities. IT can help organisations execute their sustainability strategies in a way that drives short- and long-term profitability. SAP and Technidata share this comprehensive view of sustainability. As a result, our customers enjoy more homogeneity of their IT infrastructure, lower cost of integration, and cutting edge sustainability processes combined with comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities." |
| Google is a country, not a company Posted: 22 May 2013 12:29 PM PDT
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| Posted: 22 May 2013 10:19 AM PDT Wikipedia has admitted that one of its editors has been conducting a campaign to purge the encyclopaedia of all references to the occult and modern pagans. The problem was first flagged by the pagan community in November last year when it appeared that someone had been flagging articles for deletion relating to Pagan authors, events, and notable figures. The Wikipedia editor who went by "Qworty" seemed to have a personal grudge against Jeff Rosenbaum, co-founder of the Starwood festival, and created many of these Pagan-themed pages under the moniker of "Rosencomet". Qworty had a habit of labelling people "wikispammers" when all they had done was write articles for the online encyclopaedia. One of Qworty's notes on Stregheria, which is Italian for witchcraft, said that anyone who followed this path were "mentally ill, delusional people who are worshiping Satan and their dead Roman or Neapolitan ancestors". Names were nearly deleted by Qworty included M. Macha Nightmare, Luisah Teish, Louis Martinie, Kenny Klein, LaSara FireFox, Ian Corrigan, Donald Kraig and Raven Grimassi. Writing on his blog, Donald Kraig said that the practice of "revenge edits" and self-promotion by anonymous editors, not to mention Wikipedia's own disclaimers, reveals it has no authority. Wikipedia-savvy pagans had their work cut out stopping Qworty, who turned out to be the writer Robert Clark Young. He was outed by Salon magazine and it seems that his campaign had been running for more than five years. When cornered by Salon, Young insisted that he had manage to make all his edits in accordance with Wikipedia policy. This is quite possible. We have said for some years that editors with chips on their shoulders have been purging Wackypedia of some important names and data. Young has finally been banned by Wikipedia, but only after he had made more than 13,000 edits, many of them done to pursue revenge against someone, or to protect his own page. His favourite tool was to have a small army of sock-puppets to support him in his various purges. “Wikipedia is the great postmodern novel,” declared Qworty. “Wikipedia is ‘not truth’ … Wikipedia, like any other text, is not reality.” Although his particular reign of terror did not wipe out modern paganism, he has to have done more damage to Wikipedia's image than Tomás de Torquemada managed for the Catholic church in Spain.
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| Oxford: Actually, Steve, it's "gif" or "jif" Posted: 22 May 2013 07:23 AM PDT Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF file format, caused controversy by declaring the file format should properly be pronounced 'jif' - but this has been refuted by the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Wilhite, who was awarded with a webby for his contributions to the net, said in an email interview to the New York Times that, although the Oxford English Dictionary accepts both hard and soft G pronunciations, "they are wrong". "It is a soft 'G', pronounced 'jif'. End of story,"Wilhite said. Wilhite found himself in disagreement with much of Twitter and even a US government-sanctioned Tumblr account that declared the .Gif a hard g. Although credit lies with him for popularising the acronym, language evolves and much of the web is familiar with the hard g Gif, though it is still up for debate. However, John Simpson, chief editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, explained to TechEye that both pronunciations are curremtly in use. "As we explained when GIF was selected as Oxford Dictonaries USA Word of the Year 2012, 'GIF may be pronounced with either a soft g, as in giant, or a hard g, as in graphic. The programmers who developed the format preferred a prounciation with a soft g - in homage to the commercial tagline of the peanut butter brand Jif, they supposedly quipped "choosy developers choose GIF. However, the pronunciation with a hard g is now very widespread and readily understood'". "A coiner effectively loses control of a word once it's out there," Simpson said. "For instance, the coiner of quark in the physics sense had intended it to rhyme with cork, but general usage has resulted in it rhyming with mark". "Whichever pronunciation you use for GIF, it should of course be the same for both the noun and the verb," Simpson said. *EyeSee TechEye notes that the preferred pronunciation for 'Steve Wilhite' is 'Jeve Jilhije'. |
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