64489635
submission
jfruh writes:
2014 may be the golden age of smartphones, as handset companies have a handle on what people want and are selling it to them by the million. Ten years ago, though, the landscape was weirder and more interesting, with a host of Asian handset manufacturers trying to one up each other on new and sometimes bizarre features. Offerings ranged from the ahead-of-their-times (TV on your phone ... via a satellite connection) to the laughable (a phone you could hold against your forehead to take your temperature).
64488923
submission
jfruh writes:
Hewlett-Packard has admitted in a U.S. court that its Russian subsidiary paid millions in bribes to Russian officials in order to win a contract. The scheme involves selling HP products to a reseller and then buying them back, with money shuffled through various shell corporations and proceeds spent on 'luxury automobiles, expensive jewelry, clothing, furniture and various other items' by Russian officials. Ironically, the contract HP was going for was with the Russian federal prosecutor's office.
64488795
submission
jfruh writes:
If you were a gamer in the '90s, you remember the time when owning a Matrox Millennium card meant you were hardcore. Since then, the company has retreated into specialized niches, supporting high-end applications on desktops and owning only a tiny market share, but it's making a bold bid for a comback: a passively cooled AMD-based graphics card that can support up to six 4K displays simultaneously.
64404715
submission
jfruh writes:
In 2010, HP tried to buy its way into the analytics game by shelling out billions for Autonomy, a deal that was a famous disaster. But that isn't stopping the company from making big buys: it will be buying Eucalyptus, a cloud provider headed by ex MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos, and bringing Mickos in to head the new HP Cloud division.
64404497
submission
jfruh writes:
Remember when Intel was going to be the next big TV provider, but then realized that was hard and sold the business to Verizon? Well, Verizon is announcing what it's doing with it: a "mobile TV service" that will bring the big four broadcast networks plus "custom channels" to subscribers. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was light on details, but said that the service wouldn't compete traditional pay TV offerings like Verizon's own FiOS, which probably means that it will be restricted to mobile devices only.
64373147
submission
jfruh writes:
The top European court has ruled that libraries have the right to digitize the contents of the books in their collections, even if the copyright holders on those books don't want them to. There's a catch, though: those digitized versions can only be accessed on dedicated terminals in the library itself. If library patrons want to print the book out or download it to a thumb drive, they will need to pay the publisher.
64372829
submission
jfruh writes:
If you send an email to support-de@google.com, Google's German support address, you'll receive an automatic reply informing you that Google will not respond to or even read your message, due to the large number of emails received at that address. Now a German court has ruled that this is an unacceptable response, based on a German law saying that companies must provide a means for customers to communicate with them.
64345217
submission
itwbennett writes:
Climb the ladder; make more money. Sounds good, right? But if you're a developer, you've first got to choose your ladder. In a recent blog post, Eric Bloom, an IT leadership development consultant and former CIO, tackles the question of developer career advancement. His advice sends readers down one of two (very broad) possible paths: 1) get deeply technical or 2) use your tech cred to open doors, but start pivoting into management. Are those really the only two options available to developers who want to advance in their careers?
64297165
submission
itwbennett writes:
Home Depot said Monday that its payment systems had been breached, potentially affecting any customers who shopped at its stores in the U.S. and Canada since April. There's no evidence yet that debit card PIN numbers had been compromised, the company said, though it is still figuring out the scope and scale of the attacks.
64291657
submission
itwbennett writes:
If you want to see where your old electronics go to die, take a trip to Guiyu. For two decades, PCs, phones and other electronics have been shipped to this town on the southeast coast of China, where locals in thousands of small workshops pull them apart with buzz saws and pliers to extract the valuable components inside. But things may finally be changing. A sign posted by a small stream in the town declares that Guiyu will crack down on any 'acid cleaning, and burning activities.' And residents said it's rare now to see 'board burning' in the town itself, with that and other dangerous activities having been moved to an industrial park to the north.
64287091
submission
jfruh writes:
Slideshows are an increasingly popular (and, for publishers, lucrative) web content genre. So why not automate their production? Microsoft had a beta tool that was part of Bing Image Search that did just that, but took it down in the face of a lawsuit from Getty Images. It turns out that, unlike a human web content producer, Bing couldn't distinguish between images publishers have the rights to use and images they didn't.
64286947
submission
jfruh writes:
China is notorious for censoring the Internet for its citizens, and access in the country became particularly spotty last year as the government tried to block any commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Tiannamen Square massacre. But now one Chinese man is striking back through the courts. A 26-year-old legal practitioner is suing his cell phone company, the government-owned China Unicom, and demanding a refund for periods in which he was unable to access Gmail or Google's Hong Kong search page.
64284811
submission
itwbennett writes:
Five Nigerian criminal gangs are behind most scams targeting sellers on Craigslist, and they've taken new measures to make their swindles appear legitimate, according to a study by George Mason University researchers Damon McCoy and Jackie Jones. In a new innovation, they're using professional check-writing equipment plus U.S.-based accomplices to not raise suspicions among their victims. McCoy and Jones will present their paper on Sept. 24 at the IEEE eCrime Research Summit in Birmingham, Alabama.
64175239
submission
itwbennett writes:
Every programming language has its own unique quirks, such as weird syntax, unusual functionality or non-standard implementations, things that can cause developers new to the language, or even seasoned pros, to scratch their heads in wonder (or throw their hands up in despair). ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up some of the WTFiest — from the + operator in JavaScript to the trigraphs in C and C++ and indentation level in Python. What programming language oddities cause you the most grief?
64164257
submission
jfruh writes:
Does the idea of a smartwatch with "Clock In" and "Clock Out" buttons fill you with techo-efficiency glee or Orwellian panopticon dread? Either way, if you believe Salesforce.com, business apps for wearable devices like smartwatches and Google Glass are going to be a very important part of those ecosystems in the immediate future. Of course, Salesforce is investing resources in that area, so you'd expect them to say that.
