TechEye

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• Italy retreats from Google tax
• Google doodles are sexist
• Cook tells climate deniers to bugger off
• Microsoft does some more management shuffling
• Intel produces sound technology shocka

Italy retreats from Google tax Posted: 03 Mar 2014 01:58 AM PST The new Italian government of Matteo Renzi's first job was to abandon a tax that would force firms that advertise and sell in Italy to pay up. The move was supposed to make sure that Google and Apple who make a fortune in Italy did not get to send all their dosh to off-shore bank accounts in Ireland. However cynics claimed that it was just another shot fired against Google by Silvio Berlusconi to protect his media empire against the Internet, Google and YouTube. The only problem was that the law, created by Enrico Letta was poorly worded. Not only was it easy for Google and Apple to get around, the EU warned that it was illegal. Graziano Delrio, Renzi's chief of staff, told a press conference that the law had been cancelled and that was the end of it. Renzi took to Twitter to brag about cancelling the law, something which should really annoy ordinary Italians. The only victors of his efforts are big corporates who have refused to pay tax in Italy. The law was a silly idea, but Renzi had promised to sort out the cronyism and nepotism which goes on between big business and government. It is a little annoying that his first act should be bailing out big business. Renzi still has to get the law voted out, which is expected to happen this week.

Google doodles are sexist Posted: 03 Mar 2014 01:57 AM PST An activist movement for girls and young women claims that Google Doodles are part of the US's war on women. SPARK has been adding up the numbers and dividing by its shoe size and reached the conclusion that there are too many blokes honoured in Google doodles. Of the 445 people honoured by special Google logos between 2010 and 2013, more than 82.7 percent were men. In case you did not know, or are a US Republican, half the population of the world are female. Google has at least admitted that it is aware of the problem and claims to be doing something about it. Ryan Germick, team lead for Google Doodles, told The Huffington Post that women have been underrepresented in history in almost all fields: science, school curricula, business, politics and Google Doodles. He said that this year Google is hoping to have women and men equally represented, Germick added. So far this year it had done doodles for as many women as men, a big shift from figures below 20 percent in past years. It also looks like Google is a little racist too. According to SPARK, 73.9 percent of the Doodled were "unambiguously white". Over the years, Google doodlers have been getting whiter and more male. SPARK said that the unconscious sexism echoes Silicon Valley's sexist culture. There is a lack of women in executive positions at tech companies. When they do get to the top women are marginalised. Recently a tech incubator thought it was a wizard wheeze to throw a "Hackers and Hookers"-themed party and two entrepreneurs thought a "tit-staring" app would be something people wanted. Last year Samsung decided it needed nearly naked women to sell fridges and washing machines. Google has been praise for its otherwise progressive and even iconoclastic approach. Last year, Google honoured Cesar Chavez, instead of Jesus, on Easter Sunday. It was told off by the US right, who took time out of their busy schedule of trying to control women's bodies and making the US a religious state similar to Saudi Arabia to comment about it. During the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Google seemed to take a jab at Russia's anti-gay legislation with rainbow-coloured doodles.

Cook tells climate deniers to bugger off Posted: 03 Mar 2014 01:55 AM PST It is not often that Apple does something which we think is worthy of praise, so when the fruity cargo cult actually does something impressive we believe it should be encouraged. At Apple's annual shareholder meeting, a right wing conservative think-tank, and we use the term "think" loosely, demanded that Apple follow other US companies and continue to destroy the planet. The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), is furious that Apple is turning towards green energy and hired Lisa Jackson, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to spearhead sustainability efforts for the iPhone-maker. NCPPR General Counsel Justin Danhof that his group objects to increased government control over company products and operations, and likewise mandatory environmental standards. Danhof said that Apple should be fighting against any government efforts which puts the environment over short-term profits. He called for Apple to stop its environmentally friendly initiatives. In uncharacteristic terms Cook hit back saying that despite the company's mounds of cash, it is not in the business of caving into shareholder demands, especially politically motivated ones. He said that Apple wanted to leave the world better than it found it. Cook said that any who found the company's environmental dedication either ideologically or economically ill advised, they can "get out of the stock," Cook said. Nice to see some climate-change flat-earthers get exposed as the money grubbing evil bastards that they actually are for once. Ironic that it has to be Apple doing the exposing.

Microsoft does some more management shuffling Posted: 03 Mar 2014 01:54 AM PST The shy and retiring Microsoft executive Steve "there's a kind of hush" Ballmer only just left the building, but someone is already reshuffling his staff. New broom Satya Nadella has been playing musical chairs at the Volehill. Tony Bates and Tami Reller, will leave the company while a former Clinton family aide Mark Penn will become its chief strategy officer. Penn will get a bigger hand in determining which markets Microsoft should be in and where it should be making further investments. In the Ballmer days, Penn was an executive vice president at Microsoft overseeing advertising and strategy. Bates is the former Skype CEO who was in charge of Microsoft's business development, will leave immediately. He was our favourite as a potential CEO candidate to succeed Steve Ballmer because we planned to call him Master Bates throughout his term of office. No word about what his cunning plan is. Eric Rudder who had the appropriate title of "head of advanced strategy," will temporarily take up Bates' duties and marketing executive Chris Capossela will replace Reller, the report said. Reller, one of the few female executives at the company and co-head of Microsoft's Windows unit, will remain with the company for some time to help with the transition. The plans were leaked by loyal staff at the Redmond Vole Hill. Nadella told staff of the changes on Friday and the company plans to announce them publicly on Tuesday.

Intel produces sound technology shocka Posted: 03 Mar 2014 01:53 AM PST Fashion bag maker Intel seems to have been moving away from its roots lately, but it looks like its new SSD 730 series shows that there is still hardware life in the chipmaker yet. Lately the SATA-based SSD world has been a bit of a snooze. Most current leading solid-state drives are pushing the upper limits of the 6Gbps SATA interface and can manage 500MB/sec in read-write bandwidth. This has made it difficult for anyone to tell the world "hey I am different." The Intel SSD 730 Series Solid State Drive is a consumer drive which uses the same Intel-built controller and NAND Flash design that Chipzilla used on its Enterprise DC S3500 series. Chipzilla has improved its controller clock speed by 50 percent and the NAND Flash interface by another 20 percent. Intel guarantees the new SSD 730 series for five years and rates the drive for 70 gigabytes of writes per day. The drive has a good IO throughput, especially with small random 4K transfers and large sequential reads. It is still a bit pricy at $249 for the 240GB drive and $489 for the 480GB variant. These are the pre-channel price so they will probably be cheaper when they actually hit the shops. Still, it is nice to see Intel hitting the headlines for making some good technology again.

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