TechEye |  |
- Owning an iPhone makes you a king among stupid people
- Winamp and Shoutcast saved
- Universities give up on massive open online courses
- Syrian Electronic Army hacks Skype
- HP continues lay-offs
| Owning an iPhone makes you a king among stupid people Posted: 02 Jan 2014 01:49 AM PST The Daily Fail has released one of the dumbest stories we have ever seen claiming that iPhone users are more intelligent than the rest of the riff-raff who do not waste their cash on overpriced toys. Quoting a survey by Ladbrokes the Mail makes the outrageous claim that owning an Apple handset makes you smarter than a Samsung, BlackBerry and HTC owner. The conclusion is based on an app Ladbrokes created - an online test designed to test people's wits. It provided a thousand smartphone users seven brainteasers. IPhone users apparently were the fastest at solving the problem so, according to the Dail Fail that means that they were more intelligent. BlackBerry users were the most stupid, hackett Victoria Woollaston concluded; using the sort of reasoning that indicated she was an iPhone user. Each question has four possible answers and a participant has to select the correct answer before moving onto the next teaser. The questions were things like "how many 9s are there between 1 and 100" and "how many months have 28 days". Each user is asked to select the make of handset before completing the test, and a timer in the top right-hand corner records their speed. Now clearly there is something wrong with the logic. No one who pays over the odds for the same shiny toy once a year because someone tells them to is going to be the sharpest. In fact, Apple famously designs its toys because its users are too stupid to have a proper phone. That is not a criticism, someone has to make phones for people who cannot replace a battery, but the idea that they are more intelligent than others is just too silly to contemplate. If Apples make you more intelligent then why was the fastest test of all completed by a Samsung owner? Not only that, but he did it at half the speed of an average iPhone user. Yet the test placed Samsung users as a whole in third place. So if owning a Samsung makes you stupid why was one person able to complete the test super-fast? In second place were Google Nexus owners, who completed the test just five seconds slower, on average, than top place Apple. Yet the Nexus runs the same operating system as the Samsung and it would be hard for many users to tell them apart. HTC owners were fourth while people with Nokia were deemed the dumbest. There are a number of weakpoints in the data-gathering exercise. To participate you have to be the sort of person who downloads an app which claims to measure your intelligence with seven brain teasers. It takes a special type of person to believe that concept. They come from a gene pool which mostly includes readers of magazines with lots of picture of celebs and er the Daily Mail. Therefore, the survey is a cross section of stupid people. Reading the survey in another way you can say "Apple users are the kings and queens of the stupid people" and you have got a more statistically provable story, although not one that Apple would want to market". |
| Posted: 02 Jan 2014 01:43 AM PST There are some hopes that Winamp and Shoutcast, the legacy digital music services that owner AOL planned to shutter might be sold instead. Microsoft has been ruled out of the running as a potential buyer, but it seems that the outfits are being acquired by Radionomy. Radionomy is an international aggregator of online radio stations with its HQ in Brussels. This is gossip of course, but the Radionomy connection was first noticed by Bryon Stout on the Winamp forum and Carsten Knobloch, who saw that Winamp’s nameservers, but not Shoutcast’s, had been transferred to Radionomy. It is expected that the deal is for both properties and should be finalised by Friday although it is not clear when it will be announced. Radionomy has some 6,000 stations, with an emphasis on a do-it-yourself platform that anyone can use to create a channel. Shoutcast’s 50,000-strong catalogue of radio stations will be a major boost. Winamp’s media playing software could be used to help program those radio stations and offer additional services. Rumourmongers have also pointed out that one of Radionomy’s strategic investors is MusicMatic, which develops audio and video for stores and other venues which might mean that the two products might get more commercial use. |
| Universities give up on massive open online courses Posted: 02 Jan 2014 01:41 AM PST If 2012 was the year that massive open online courses (MOOCs) took off, 2013 was when they were found to be about as useful as the song "Blurred Lines" was for rape education. NPR said that many saw the rapid expansion of MOOCs as a higher education revolution that would fix the problems of access for underserved students and cost. It meant that students saddled by rising debt and unable to tap into the best schools and take free classes from rock star professors at elite schools via Udacity, edX, Coursera and other MOOC platforms. Part of the problem was that teachers at several institutions rebelled against the rapid expansion of online learning and completion rates and grades were worse than for those who took traditional classes. To make matters worse the students who did best were not the underserved students wanted to teach. The people who did well were those who were already good students or had already graduated and wanted extra credits. MOOCs have few active users. About half who registered for a class ever viewed a lecture and completion rates averaged just four percent across all courses. Apparently, when you looked at the costs involved, they were not much cheaper to run. Universities are starting to scale back on their commitment to MOOCs. Students complain that you have to be super-motivated for them to work and there was no sense of community or human interaction. |
| Syrian Electronic Army hacks Skype Posted: 02 Jan 2014 01:40 AM PST The hacker collective loyal to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad has managed to hack into the social media accounts of Internet calling service Skype. The Syrian Electronic Army published the contact information of shy and soon to be retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the mistaken belief that someone might want to call him. Apparently, the SEA is upset that Microsoft is monitoring all Skype calls for the US spooks. While this might be outrageous, it does not tend to generate so much outrage as having your loyal paramilitaries pulling people from their beds and executing them, or dropping chemical weapons on kids. A message posted on Skype's official Twitter feed on Wednesday, apparently by the hacking group, read: "Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments. More details soon. #SEA" Similar messages were posted on Skype's official Facebook pages and on a blog on its website before being taken down in late afternoon. The SEA later tweeted out copies of the message "for those who missed it"/ This week, a monitoring group claimed the death toll in Syria's civil war, which began in March 2011 as peaceful protests against four decades of rule by Assad's family, had risen to at least 130,000. Microsoft has yet to release figures for the number of chairs broken during meetings with Steve Ballmer in Redmond. |
| Posted: 02 Jan 2014 01:39 AM PST The maker of printer ink more expensive than gold has decided that it does not need 5,000 people and told them to clean out their desks. HP has laid off more than 34,000 people during a restructuring which has literally decimated the company. For those who came in late, decimation was a practice in the Roman Army where ten percent of a legion were murdered by those left standing as a disciplinary measure. By getting rid of 34,000, HP has removed 11 percent of its workforce. The cost of getting rid of these staff is $4.1 billion in 2014, up from its prior estimate of $3.6 billion. The move is part of a cunning plan to get back to growth using retrenchment and other means that J Edgar Hoover would have thought was a good idea. Job cuts and “focusing on businesses with longer-term potential such as enterprise services” has been the order of the day. More job cuts are expected. HP had estimated that it would cut about 29,000 jobs through fiscal year 2014. The company had about 317,500 employees as of October 31 so it still has a few people left. The cost cutting has been popular with shareholders. The price of HP shares have gone up by 96 percent over the last year. |
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