Thursday, October 31, 2013

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Crop World hit by anti-Monsanto protests

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 05:36 AM PDT

Anti-Monsanto and GM crops protesters swooped on Amsterdam's RAI conference centre - where the RSA Conference is taking place - armed with a drum circle and several hundred people.

"Crop World 2013" was running just next door to RSA 2013. Protesters from March against Monsanto told TechEye that they object to the actions of big crop companies around the world, including enforcing their patents and saddling farmers with crippling debt.

One organiser said: "The evidence shows pesticide use is going up and in the longer term the harvest doesn't go up - maybe in the first few years, but now it's lower with GM crops than with normal crops. So what are they doing?

"They make money, but it's not useful.

"It's making farmers dependents, and it's creating more super weeds. It's clearly their business, but there is no argument for it continuing".

The demonstration was peaceful, if noisy, and security staff didn't seem concerned.

We tried to gain access to Crop World 2013, but our RSA badge could only get us so far.

Intel fab deal is no fab deal

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 03:50 AM PDT

Altera has announced that its next generation 64-bit ARM parts will be built by Intel. The announcement caused shockwaves and rippled through the industry for no apparent reason. Many observers wrongly viewed it as a deal under which Intel is yielding to competitive pressure and opening its fabs to ARM outfits. This is simply not the case.

The Altera deal includes the fabrication of several designs based on ARM’s new 64-bit instruction set and the quad-core chips in question will apparently be based on the Cortex A53 cores. They are not consumer parts, they are aimed at the embedded market.

For some reason overexcited hacks and analysts quickly started saying the deal would open the floodgates to ARM chips built in Intel’s fabs, using the upcoming 14nm FinFET process. This is simply not the case. There is absolutely no reason for Intel to allow competitors like Qualcomm, Samsung or even Nvidia to use its process for consumer-grade parts.

In fact, the only way Intel’s own x86 SoCs can be competitive in the short run is if Intel leverages its superior manufacturing process. As x86 is inherently less efficient than ARM, Intel simply needs to cram more transistors to get the same results, but x86 parts also have a lot of advantages, namely Windows support.

While it is true that fabs don’t come cheap and Intel could use the cash, that doesn’t mean it will put a gun to its head for a bit of fab revenue. It will not and we will not see third-party application processors manufactured alongside Intel’s own Airmont parts. Anyone claiming otherwise is spectacularly wrong.

NSA hacks into Google and Yahoo datacentres

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 02:41 AM PDT

The Washington Post  has run a chilling story which claims the NSA hacked into the Google and Yahoo datacentres.

NSA documents seen by the Post said that the spooks carried out "full take," "bulk access" and "high volume" operations on Yahoo and Google networks.

Normally large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but it seems that the operations took place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.

John Schindler, a former NSA chief analyst said the agency has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximise collection by exploiting every loophole.

Google and Yahoo maintain fortresslike data centres across four continents and connect them with thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable.

Yahoo's internal network transmits entire e-mail archives from one data centre to another, which is when the NSA would pounce.

Tapping the Google and Yahoo clouds allows the NSA to intercept communications and read the material at its leisure. Spooks had to circumvent gold-standard security to get the data.

The weak point might have been some of the premium data links which the two search engines have been buying or leasing.

They had reason to think, insiders said, that their private, internal networks were safe from prying eyes, but apparently not. 

Computerised wristwatches expected to be Christmas turkey

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 02:40 AM PDT

We are predicting that the market will be flooded with computerised wristwatches this Christmas, but they will sit on the shelves.

If you want to buy one, we suggest waiting until the Christmas sales as the Turkey factor of these toys becomes obvious.

Computerised watches are an idea based on rumours that Apple was going to release on as its lastest wow thing. This did not happen, mostly because even Jobs' Mob thought that the idea did not have legs.

The watches link to your mobile phone and display message alerts and weather updates, oh and the time. However it seems unlikely to us that people will splash out $300 to save them having to take their phone out of their pockets. While wristwatches were common in my generation, they were killed off when kids started carrying mobile phones.

Samsung and Sony have devices out, and Qualcomm has one coming before the holidays.

Jonathan Gaw, a research manager at IDC agrees with us. He thinks that manufacturers forgot to ask consumers if they wanted one before making it.

Apple might be able to get away with telling its fanboys what to buy, but other people in the market have to ask nicely.

The concept that smartwatches would ramp up for the holidays was always kind of a stretch, he said.

Last month, Samsung Electronics started selling the $300 Galaxy Gear in the US. It only works with some of its phones and tells you if you have mail and lets you make calls talking to your wrist.

Sony's SmartWatch 2 is cheaper, at $200 and works with a variety of Android phones but it does not let you make phone calls. You can answer calls using the watch, but you need a Bluetooth wireless headset linked to the phone if you don't want to hold it to your ear.

Qualcomm plans to start selling its Toq before the holidays. It, too, will work with several Android devices.

So far the only one which seems to be getting much interest is the Pebble, which comes from a startup that raised more than $10 million through the fundraising site Kickstarter. It notifies you of incoming calls, texts and emails. 

Steve Jobs works at Lenovo

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 01:55 AM PDT

It is not often that we get an Elvis is alive and living on Mars story cross our desks, but it seems that we have found one.

Lenovo, which is famous for buying huge chunks of IBM, is apparently trying to sex up its image somewhat, by hiring a new product engineer who happens to be known to tinsel town for recent Steve Jobs' flick.

Ashton Kutcher, the bloke who was such a Steve Jobs fan that he literally became the cargo cult messiah, will travel the world developing and hawking Lenovo's new Yoga line of tablets.

This means that people will get to see a Lenovo product launch given by a Steve Jobs' clone, and in the style of the black turtle neck messiah himself.

Over the years, Lenovo has given celebrity advisors honorary positions in the company and it appears that Ashton Kutcher is the company's latest honouree.

We will not believe that Aston will take his role seriously until he starts calling Lenovo's chipmakers "fucking dickless assholes," starts ranting at the maker of his smoothie at a Wholefoods café, ignores his daughter for years, firing staff without notice, cheats his best friend and pockets cash for projects he did no work on, attempts to censor his favourite newspaper for writing about his health, parking in disabled carparks.

Still Kutcher thinks that working for Lenovo was his dream job as it brings together his love of technology and design that makes your life better.

"I can't wait to dig in and help Lenovo develop future mobile computing products, starting with the Yoga Tablet," said Kutcher.


 

AMD turns into ATI

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 01:53 AM PDT

Word on the street is that AMD is about to take control of 40 per cent of the GPU market.

Taiwanese oracle Digitimes has been chatting to its unnamed graphics card maker sources and come up with a yarn which claims that AMD's global market share for GPUs is on the rise since the launch of its Radeon R7 and R9 series.

In fact, the outfit is expected to increase to 40 percent over the next half year.

Recently AMD announced net profits of $48 million for the third quarter with notebook-related shipments dropping significantly and revenues from GPUs also declining.

But sales from customised products and stable desktop shipments helped the company to turn profitable.

AMD itself is not doing so well, but it is starting to look like it is dependent on its graphics business to keep it sinking under completely.

There were those who thought that AMD was insane to write a cheque for $5.6 billion to buy ATI in 2006. But over the last two years the GPU business has done wonders for AMDs bottom line. If the Digitimes rumours are correct then it means that AMD is fast becoming ATI as its own regular chip business flounders. 

Intel giving up on TV business

Posted: 31 Oct 2013 01:52 AM PDT

It appears that Big Content might have killed off Intel’s cunning plan to get into the TV business.

Intel had built a set top box and was all set to produce streaming television to punters homes, in a move that would help it expand out of its core market.

Lately Intel had wanted to get out of the chip making market and had invested in a rather nice fashion bag range.

But it seems that Intel was unable to get Big Content to agree to the plan.  Big Content is still trapped in the 20th century and does not want people streaming its content in case they pirate it.  They would rather lose shedloads of money to pirates who download the content from pirate sites and stream it to their set-top boxes.  In other words, people are doing what Intel wanted to do anyway, it is just Big Content is not being paid for it.

This makes Netflix once of the few companies that has ever managed it and made Big Content and itself a killing. 

Now it looks like Intel is in talks to hand over Intel Media to its partner Verizon.

The situation is being seen as another example of how Intel cannot transform itself.   After all it did attempt to make communications chips, consumer electronics, processors for TVs, serve as a web hosting backbone, a vendor of videoconferencing services and participate in other markets.

However Chipzilla tends to get bored rather quickly. The only thing that seems to be working is Intel’s moves to become a foundry for hire.

Ironically that has involved it becoming a revolutionary producer of a 14-nanometer 64 bit ARM chip
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