66697455
submission
jfruh writes:
There's a lot more to building a new hospital than just unrolling a blueprint these days. This video shows some of the tools used to help people better navigate the complex infrastructure that underlies a high-tech building: designs that can be viewed with 3D glasses, and tiny drones that can fly into the worksite to check on hard-to-reach spaces.
66697027
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook, not satisfied with being the site you sneak peeks with at the office when you should be doing real work, now wants to be someplace where you actually do that real work, with work collaboration and document editing features supposedly in the works. Of course, Facebook also says that "For users who are truly concerned with sharing their information with a particular platform, honestly, you might not want to share information with that platform."
66587423
submission
itwbennett writes:
Earlier this week, Microsoft patched a 19-year-old security vulnerability that has been present in every version of its operating systems since the release of Windows 1995. As the IBM researchers who discovered the bug put it, it’s been 'sitting in plain site' while other vulnerabilities in the same library have been fixed over the years. While it may seem surprising that a critical error in such a major piece of software, used by so many people, could go unnoticed for decades, it’s actually not that uncommon, writes ITworld's Phil Johnson, who rounded up 10 more examples of software bugs that were particularly long-lived — not all of which have yet been fixed.
66580389
submission
jfruh writes:
As Microsoft focuses its Xbox line firmly on games, Sony seems to be taking the opposite track with the PlayStation. PlayStation Vue will be a new TV service for PlayStation 3 and 4 users that allows both live viewing of TV and watching episodes later at your leisure. Beta testing begins soon in New York.
66580045
submission
jfruh writes:
To the chorus of companies opposed to President Obama's net neutrality proposals, add another: Cisco. The networking giant says the regulations would deter ISPs from making investments in their networks, which would in turn hurt sales of Cisco equipment.
66579941
submission
itwbennett writes:
Since 2010, Lenovo's smartphone business has almost solely grown on demand from Chinese consumers, with the company rising to become one of the country's top handset vendors. 'But now the China market is not hyper-growing any longer,' said Lenovo's CEO Yang Yuanqing in an earnings call earlier this month. 'It has been saturated. If you want to win you have to find new growth areas.'
66577917
submission
itwbennett writes:
Facebook has just started testing lithium-ion batteries as the backup power source for its server racks and plans to roll them out widely next year. Lithium-ion has been too expensive until now, says Matt Corddry, Facebook's director of hardware engineering, but its use in electric cars has changed the economics. It's now more cost effective than the bulky, lead-acid batteries widely used in data centers today.
66536423
submission
itwbennett writes:
A U.S. court has quashed an attempt to seize Iran's, Syria's and North Korea's domains as part of a lawsuit against those countries' governments. The plaintiffs in the case wanted to seize the domains after they successfully sued Iran, Syria and North Korea as state sponsors of terrorism. But the court found the domains have the nature of a contractual right, and ruled that rights arising under a contract cannot be seized as part of a judgment.
66488203
submission
jfruh writes:
It's not a fun time to be a Qualcomm lawyer. In China, the company is under investigation for overcharging local licensees of its patents. In the U.S., the FTC began probing it in September for unfair trade practices. And last month, the European Commission opened an investigation of Qualcomm's use of rebates and financial incentives for customers.
66488041
submission
jfruh writes:
Last year, a bipartisan coalition helped get the Main Street Fairness Act, which would allow state and local governments to collect sales taxes on Internet sales by companies in different jurisdictions, approved by the U.S. Senate. But House Speaker John Boehner, a longtime opponent of Internet taxes, won't bring the matter to a vote in the House before the end of the year, which should kill it for the immediate future.
66441111
submission
jfruh writes:
In-flight Wi-Fi services tend to be expensive and disappointingly slow. So when AT&T announced a few months ago that it was planning on getting into the business, with customer airlines being able to connect to AT&T's LTE network instead of slow sattelite services, the industry shook. But now AT&T has announced that, upon further review, they're not going to bother.
66395545
submission
itwbennett writes:
Germany's foreign intelligence agency reportedly wants to spend €300 million (about $375 million) in the next five years on technology that would let it spy in real time on social networks outside of Germany, and decrypt and monitor encrypted Internet traffic. The agency, which already spent €6.22 million in preparation for this online surveillance push, also wants to use the money to set up an early warning system for cyber attacks, the report said. A prototype is expected to be launched next June with the aim of monitoring publicly available data on Twitter and blogs.
66393679
submission
jfruh writes:
If you're part of the homebuilt PC scene, you've almost certainly heard of Zalman Tech, a Korean company that makes innovative cooling systems that won't leave your high-powered computer sounding like a jet engine about to take off. But now it appears Zalman is doomed — not because of any weakness in the market, but because Moneual, Zalman's parent company, has been overstating its profits for years in order to qualify for loans that that its owners have used for personal purposes, leaving the company a bankrupt shell.
66393115
submission
itwbennett writes:
NEC has developed an anti-counterfeiting smartphone app that compares images snapped with a phone with those in a cloud-based database. The "object fingerprint" technology can establish authenticity by identifying fine patterns in the grain of metal or plastic that occur naturally during manufacturing and are invisible to the human eye. The accuracy of the system depends on the material in question, but NEC said its tests on bolts yielded an equal error rate (EER) of less than one in 1 million.
66285973
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook recently held its first ever town-hall meeting in which Mark Zuckerberg took questions from the general public, and one of his answers might raised some eyebrows. When asked if the increasing numbers of photos being uploaded might strain the company's servers, he said the infrastructure is more than up to the task, because they're preparing for the fact that 'in five years, most of [Facebook] will be video.'
