TechEye |  |
- Apple’s Woz jailed for building fake bomb
- SAP boss loses an eye after fall
- Microsoft discriminates against women claim
- Cloudy outlook for Oracle
- Chinese censors make console sales tricky
- Too much Windows XP in Eastern Europe
- Bookseller wants Amazon Women on the Moon
- Schrodinger’s cat gets its cheezburger
- Apple can’t get its watch to run on time
| Apple’s Woz jailed for building fake bomb Posted: 17 Sep 2015 01:10 AM PDT
According to a new Steve Jobs biography, Wozniak was jailed for building a fake bomb in high school. Wozniak built an electronic metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together. He then put it in a school locker and rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later he was called to the principal's office and was confronted by the police. The principal had been summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz was sent to the juvenile detention centre, where he spent the night. Apparently he taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked when touching them. Given that the US tends to want to jail kids for building their own clockwork experiments, it is more likely that Woz would have got 100 years for his bomb-making prank and there never would have been an Apple. The recent case of police wanting to jail Ahmed Mohamed for the crime of building a clock and bought it to school to show his teacher is being seen as punishing engineering genius. Just as well Woz is white and didn't go to school in Texas in 2015 |
| SAP boss loses an eye after fall Posted: 17 Sep 2015 12:38 AM PDT
SAP boss Bill McDermott, 54 was walking down stairs at night carrying a glass of water in his left hand when he slipped and landed on the tumbler. McDermott almost bled to death after cutting up his face and shattering his eye socket in the midnight fall. German magazine WirtschaftsWoche reported Doctors couldn’t save his left eye despite their best efforts. The chief exec said he was still alive, and that's not a given after such a bad accident. "This can happen to anyone. It's important to stand up after you've fallen down." Plattner drew up a contingency plan for the future leadership of SAP just in case McDermott quit as a result of his injuries, but it looks like he will pull through.
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| Microsoft discriminates against women claim Posted: 17 Sep 2015 12:10 AM PDT
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Seattle, Washington by former technician Katherine Moussouris, who claims she was passed over for promotions given to less-qualified men and was told supervisors did not like her “manner or style.” Vole gives employees numerical rankings based on performance evaluations, but routinely gave female workers lower ratings based on subjective criteria. Adam Klein of employment law firm Outten & Golden in New York, one of the firms representing Moussouris claimed that Vole systematically undervalues the efforts and achievements of its female technical employees. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last year was criticized for suggesting at an industry conference that women in technology jobs should not ask for pay raises and should have faith that their companies will compensate them fairly. He later apologised, but also maintained that the company paid men and women equally. Wednesday’s lawsuit is the first of its kind filed against Microsoft but the US Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks that men in the tech industry last year earned about 24 percent more than their female colleagues. Moussouris, who is seeking to represent a class of any female U.S. technical workers employed by Microsoft since 2009, also claims she received a low bonus in retaliation for reporting sexual harassment. She resigned in 2014 after seven years with the company, the lawsuit says, because supervisors failed to address what she claimed was pervasive discrimination. The lawsuit said damages would be in excess of $5 million. Microsoft currently has about 117,000 employees. |
| Posted: 17 Sep 2015 12:04 AM PDT
Oracle sales fell more than expected in the first quarter, hurt by a strong dollar and a continued drop in licensed software sales and the company warned revenue could fall in the current quarter even on a constant currency basis. Oracle is striving to boost Internet-based software sales to head off fast-growing competitors such as Salesforce.com but what it is doing does not appear to be working. Analysts think that Oracle’s cloud software business has not been growing fast enough to make up for declines in the licensed software business. Oracle’s revenue declined 1.7 percent to $8.45 billion in the quarter ended Aug. 31, missing analysts estimates for the third quarter in a row. The company said sales increased 7 percent on a constant currency basis. However, it forecast revenue to range between a fall of 2 percent to growth of 1 percent in the current quarter. The company’s net income declined 20 percent to $1.75 billion in the first quarter. Sales of Oracle’s cloud-computing software and platform service rose 34 percent to $451 million. Sales of traditional software licenses fell 16 percent to $1.51 billion. Wall Street was expecting cloud-based sales to increase 35 percent and licensed software sales to decline 17 percent,. Cloud-based software sales account for a small portion of Oracles’ total revenue as they are subscription based, which promise a steady revenue stream but with lower margins. Fundamentally, all of Oracle’s software will be available on the cloud by the OpenWorld conference at the end of October, Co-Chief Executive Mark Hurd said on a call with analysts.
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| Chinese censors make console sales tricky Posted: 16 Sep 2015 11:58 PM PDT
China lifted a ban on foreign gaming consoles last year, but the head of Sony’s gaming division Andrew House some of the rules made entry into the market difficult. “We are still challenged somewhat with a censorship regime that we have to work with. This can be time-consuming,” he said. Sony started selling PlayStation 4 consoles in China in March, hoping to capitaliise on the end of the 14-year ban. But Beijing’s tough censorship rules have limited the number of gaming titles. House said he still saw “tremendous potential for gaming as an entertainment medium in China” but there had been no rocketship start. Sony is slashing PlayStation 4 prices in Asia in an effort to boost sales. PlayStation, along with camera sensors, have helped to offset a slump in sales of Sony’s traditional consumer electronics such as smartphones and TVs. The company expects operating profit to more than quadruple this fiscal year. Sony has sold about 25 million PlayStation 4 game consoles since its late 2013 launch, almost double the sales of Microsoft Corp’s XBox One, according to market research firm VGChartz.
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| Too much Windows XP in Eastern Europe Posted: 16 Sep 2015 11:46 PM PDT
According to a report by Bitdefender, companies are refusing to let it go, leaving themselves wide open for malware attacks. Ukraine tops the list of those who still can’t let go, with 41.2 per cent of businesses and public computers. Hungary and Romania closely follow, garnering 37.5 per cent and 34 per cent , respectively. Runners-up are Poland with 24.05%, Republic of Moldova at 18.7 per cent , and Slovakia at 10.61 per cent . Other countries who made the list are Bulgaria, with six per cent. The Czech Republic has 4.7 per cent. Liviu Arsene, threat analyst for Bitdefender said that some were using Windows XP because of legacy issues with proprietary applications and systems. Some internal software on company’s systems has not been updated, which in result makes them incompatible with newer OSes, like Windows 7 and 8.1. Arsene said it was jolly dangerous as the Windows XP machines could be a gateway for hackers to infiltrate a computer. “Migrating to a more recent version won’t just add features, it will also increase security,” Arsene said. He foresees Windows XP’s usage to further dwindle globally and in the Europe in the future, as he believes that the security implications of staying with XP can no longer be ignored. |
| Bookseller wants Amazon Women on the Moon Posted: 16 Sep 2015 11:37 PM PDT
The tech entrepreneur’s initial $200m investment will see him set up new manufacturing facilities and take control of the Launch Complex 36 pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Amazon has been doing a lot of space research lately. In April, in Texas, he tested a sub-orbital vehicle called New Shepard. This hurled a capsule vertically high into the sky. And although the propulsion unit did not return to the ground under control, as intended, the capsule did parachute safely to a soft landing. A year ago, Mr Bezos’s space start-up, known as Blue Origin, was commissioned to develop a powerful, liquid methane-fuelled engine for United Launch Alliance. ULA, which lofts most of the military and national security missions in the US, intends to use the new engine on its next-generation Vulcan launcher. The Amazon.com CEO says he will test the engine, codenamed Blue Engine-4, in Florida. And it will also power the orbital rocket that Blue Origin itself has on the design table – what Mr Bezos calls “New Shepard’s sibling, her Very Big Brother”. “As a kid, I was inspired by the giant Saturn V missions that roared to life from these shores,” he wrote. “Now we are thrilled to be coming to the Sunshine State for a new era of exploration.” Mr Bezos’s $200m is expected to create roughly 300 jobs. His arrival on the Space Coast will put him in direct competition with Elon Musk, who also made a fortune from internet ventures before getting into space activity. Musk’s company, California-based SpaceX, already launches orbital rockets from the Air Force Station. He is also refurbishing the old shuttle pad 39A at the nearby Kennedy Space Center. The two entrepreneurs had an argument over who should get access to that facility, and of late they have been in a patent dispute over who owns the intellectual property on reusable rocket technology. |
| Schrodinger’s cat gets its cheezburger Posted: 16 Sep 2015 11:32 PM PDT
In Schrödinger's 1935-thought experiment, a cat found itself in a closed box with a small radioactive source, a Geiger counter, a hammer and a small bottle of poison. It would make the cat potentially dead or alive – and thus create two very hacked off moggies. Now the boffins will suspend a common microbe in that same uncertain state similar to that endured by Schrödinger's cat to see what happens. The uncertainty will centre on the bacteria's geographical whereabouts. Tongcang Li of Purdue University, Indiana, told the Guardian that the experiment should put an organism in two different locations at the same time. "In many fairy tales, a fairy could be at two different locations or change locations instantly. This will be similar to that. Although it will be a microbe instead of a fairy," he added. So far no one has managed to get quantum superposition state of an organism yet. The researchers plan to build on the work of others at the University of Colorado who showed in 2013 that a tiny, vibrating aluminium membrane could be placed in a superposition of states. "We propose to simply put a small microbe on top of the aluminium membrane. The microbe will also be in a superposition state when the aluminium membrane is in a superposition state. The principle is quite simple," Dr Li said. The researchers plan to go one step further in a second experiment that would entangle the position of the microbe with the spin of an electron inside it. "The purpose of the second experiment is to make the system useful. It can be used to detect defects of DNA and proteins in a microbe, and image the microbe with single electron spin sensitivity," Dr Li said.
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| Apple can’t get its watch to run on time Posted: 16 Sep 2015 11:22 PM PDT The big watchOS 2 update was supposed to bring some big improvements to Apple Watch, including an improved Siri, native apps, third-party complications, and new watch faces. According to Pocket-lint.com the watchOS has some problems which are taking longer than expected to fix. It was supposed to be out yesterday but those wearing the Apple Watch will have to endure the existing OS wait a bit longer. Jobs’ Mob has confirmed that it has discovered a bug in development of watchOS 2 and the roll out will happen shortly. Apple’s iWatch has been a huge disappointment since it was released and most users are hardly using it for anything other than telling the time. It had been hoped that updating the watch would make it a little more acceptable to those who paid a fortune to own it, and perhaps improve battery life. The iOS 9 update for iPhones and iPads is not affected and it should be rolling out to supported devices. |
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