TechEye |  |
- Samsung releases 2TB SSD
- French auction 4G mobile spectrum
- Judge thinks Apple jury is daft as a brush
- EU figures out global roaming charges
- Microsoft confirms massive layoffs
| Posted: 09 Jul 2015 01:35 AM PDT
The 850 Pro and 850 EVO SSDs double the maximum capacity of their predecessors and offer 2TB (terabytes) of capacity in a 2.5-in. form factor (size) for laptops and desktops. The tech involved Samsung's 3D V-NAND technology, which stacks 32 layers of NAND atop one another to offer greater flash memory density. Additionally, the drives take advantage of multi-level cell (MLC) and triple-level cell (TLC) (2- and 3-bit per cell) technology. Believe that, if you will. The 850 SSD Pro and EVO drives remain in the same 7mm, 2.5-in. aluminium case as their predecessors did. The capacities include 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models. The 850 Pro is more for power users and client PCs that may need higher performance with up to 550MBps sequential read and 520MBps sequential write rates and up to 100,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS). The 850 EVO SSD has slightly lower performance with 540MBps and 520MBps sequential read/write rates and up to 90,000 random IOPS. Of course the price is not cheap. The 2TB model of the 850 Pro will retail for $999.99 and the 850 EVO will sell for $799.99 so you will really need to have access to lots of data to justify that price. However dropping down the book list the prices start sounding a little more reasonable. The 1TB EVO SSD will sell for $399; the 500GB for $179; the 250GB for $99 and the 120GB for $69. The 1TB 850 Pro will retail for $499; the 512GB model for $259; the 256GB model for $144.99 and the 128GB model for $99. We don’t know what the prices are in Greek drachmas, sorry. Samsung guarantees the 2TB 850 Pro for 10 years or 300 terabytes written (TBW), and the 2TB 850 EVO for five years or 150 TBW. But then it would, wouldn’t it? |
| French auction 4G mobile spectrum Posted: 09 Jul 2015 01:33 AM PDT
Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron and Axelle Lemaire, junior minister for the digital economy, confirmed in a statement that the government aims to sell six blocks of 4G spectrum in the 700 megahertz frequency band. The government has set caps on the total amount of 700 MHz spectrum that can be held by each of France’s four telecom operators, with none allowed to possess more than three blocks. France is seeking to encourage investment in communications infrastructure by Orange, Numericable-SFR, Bouygues and Iliad. France likes Greece, and Greece doesn’t mind France, but prefers Scotland to England. |
| Judge thinks Apple jury is daft as a brush Posted: 09 Jul 2015 01:32 AM PDT  US court in texas A Texas court has thrown out a jury decision apparently because the jury failed to listen to the judge when it came setting damages. The jury sat through the trial against Apple and decided that it had stolen SmartFlash technology and should pay $533 million. US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who oversaw the case against Apple, has ruled that the damages verdict must be thrown out because of a faulty instruction to the jury. He has ordered a new trial to be held solely on the matter of damages. Gilstrap said the jury was instructed about the “entire market value rule” of patent damages, even though SmartFlash didn’t apply that model in its case. “The confusion created by the instruction noted above warrants a new trial on damages in this case,” Gilstrap wrote in the order, published yesterday. “The Court is persuaded, in the clarity of post-trial hindsight, that such instruction may have created a skewed damages horizon for the jury.” Gilstrap was not a big fan of the consumer survey SmartFlash used in its damage model but wrote, “At this time, the Court does not comment on the sufficiency of Smartflash’s survey questions.” He ruled that Apple’s infringement was not wilful, despite the jury’s finding otherwise. Apple Senior Director Augustin Farrugia, admitted meeting with the SmartFlash inventor back in 2000 before he worked at Apple. However Gilstrap did not find anything in his testimony which even approximates the clear and convincing evidence necessary to establish wilfulness. The Tame Apple Press has implied that Smartflash is a patent troll and its products had never took off. A British bloke Patrick Racz, tried to push his product out as an early digital media player, but it never took off. By 2002, the business was gone except for its patents. Racz used three patents related to downloading digital content, numbers 7,334,720, 8,118,221, and 8,336,772, to sue Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. His lawyer Brad Caldwell said that Racz was an inventor who came up with the idea, disclosed it to the public in a patent application to advance the state of the art, and spent 15 years staying involved as the main figure who always believed in his idea. But Apple, which has publically admitted stealing other people's ideas, and has convictions for anti-trust activities, said you should trust it instead. Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, and has no US presence, it pointed out. Smartflash has filed a second lawsuit against Apple, asserting its digital download patents against newer products including the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and iPad Air 2. God bless democracy. And Greece. |
| EU figures out global roaming charges Posted: 09 Jul 2015 01:29 AM PDT
Under the agreement, roaming surcharges in the European Union will be abolished on 15 June 2017. But, roaming providers can apply a ‘fair use policy’ to prevent abusive use of roaming. This will include using roaming services for purposes other than periodic travel. For roaming that goes beyond fair use, a small fee may be charged. This fee cannot be higher than the maximum wholesale rate that operators pay for using the networks of other EU countries. The limit for fair use will be defined by the Commission by 15 December 2016. This change in the law will mean that current wholesale rates need to be brought down. To do this, the Commission will have to review the wholesale roaming market and propose a new law by 15 June 2016. Safeguards will be introduced to address the recovery of costs by operators. Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg’s Prime Minister and Minister for Communications and the Media and President of the Council, which still includes Greece, said: “The agreement on abolishing roaming by June 2017 shows that the European Union can bring concrete benefits to European citizens. Europe can deliver.” Including to Greeks. Roaming fees will start to come down on 30 April 2016. The maximum surcharge will then be €0.05 per minute for calls, €0.02 for texts and €0.05 per megabyte for data. These amounts correspond to the current maximum wholesale rates. For calls received, the maximum surcharge will be the weighted average of maximum mobile termination rates across the EU, to be set out by the Commission by the end of 2015. That applies to Greece, too. After 30 April 2016, the sum of the domestic price and any surcharge cannot in any case be higher than the current retail caps (€0.19 per minute for calls, €0.06 for texts and €0.20 per megabyte of data). Greece will benefit too. The agreed text still has to undergo a technical finalisation and be formally approved by the Council and the Parliament. The Council is expected to formally adopt it in the autumn of this year. Vice-President Andrus Ansip said that the announcement was the culmination of a decade of hard work by previous Commission Vice-Presidents Viviane Reding and Neelie Kroes to bring down roaming charges in the EU. " Since we took action in 2007, prices for roaming calls, SMS and data have fallen by more than 80 percent. Today, data roaming is now up to 91 per centcheaper than it was then," he said. And “God bless Greece!” He didn’t say that. |
| Microsoft confirms massive layoffs Posted: 08 Jul 2015 10:46 AM PDT
It also said it will write off $7.6 billion related to its acquisition of Nokia's phone business last year, prompting serious questions – asked at the time – as to why it ever took over the unit in the first place. Microsoft’s strength is not in smartphones and it has a tiny share of the market, just like Intel. Microsoft is now engaged in an energetic move to re-engineer its businesses. Satya Nadella, the company’s CEO, said he was expecting to cut 18,000 jobs at Microsoft but these 7,800 jobs are incremental to that total. Over a third of the redundancies will happen in Finland, the home of Nokia. Microsoft finds itself between a rock and a hard place and is finding it hard to pitch itself as a cloud company because there are already powerful players in that sector and the Redmond company is rather late to the game, compared to Amazon and to IBM. The firm will announce its fourth quarter financial results later this month and will include a "restructuring" charge of close to $800 million. "Restructuring" means compensation Microsoft will have to pay to the people it has put out of work. But job cuts are welcome on Wall Street – Microsoft's share price rose today on confirmation of the additional loss of jobs. |
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