24442604
submission
beschra writes:
The future of animated TV comedy "The Simpsons" was up in the air on Tuesday after 20th Century Fox Television said it could no longer afford to produce the show without a huge pay cut for its cast.
Fox Television, a unit of News Corp, issued a tough statement after a report that it had threatened to end the subversive series unless the voice actors take a 45 percent pay cut.
"We believe this brilliant series can and should continue, but we cannot produce future seasons under its current financial model," Fox said.
"We are hopeful that we can reach an agreement with the voice cast that allows 'The Simpsons' to go on entertaining audiences with original episodes for many years to come," the statement added.
24442278
submission
Lucas123 writes:
After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware. Yet, the bank has set up a new homepage that it says will help customers navigate to the proper online service. Internet monitoring service Keynote said the outage is unprecedented in banking. 'I don't think we've seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I've been with Keynote for 16 years now,' said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. In the meantime, a BofA spokeswoman continued to devulge what might be happening, saying 'We're not going to get into the technical details. We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do.' Speculation among experts has been that the site is under attack.
24441860
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco is gearing up its sales force to exploit the turmoil currently enveloping rival HP. Cisco sales EVP Rob Lloyd apparently circulated an eight-page internal memo detailing what Cisco views as the impact of HP exiting the tablet, smartphone and PC businesses on the company. HP will hurt not only its own bottom line but that of its partners, the memo claims. Lopping off the PC business specifically will hurt sales of other HP hardware, such as low-end servers, by reducing purchasing power and economies of scale with customers and partners. The move, if it happens, might also render HP's enterprise software and networking businesses as point product solutions lacking an overall end-to-end IT infrastructure play.
24441650
submission
donniebaseball23 writes:
Some investors and consumers were disappointed this week after months of speculation that a new iPhone 5 would be announced, and all Apple revealed was the iPhone 4S. But in some ways, if you ask game developers, it's actually a good thing that Apple didn't overhaul the iPhone (other than its innards). Ed Del Castillo, President, Liquid Entertainment, explains, "The launch of iPhone 4S and iOS5 give developers the much needed breathing room they need to keep up and with Apple on their devices." Del Castillo notes that the move means developers can "have a more consolidated graphics strategy" and it means Apple won't be "disenfranchising their base by making their tech obsolete year over year."
24408410
submission
aabelro writes:
Oracle has announced the Big Data Appliance running with Oracle NoSQL Database, a new key-value store based on Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition. Some of features include: billions of rows of storage capacity in records and terabytes in B-tree, ACID transactions, CRUD, sharding, no single point of failure, disaster recovery via datacenter replication.
24407444
submission
Lucas123 writes:
Although much of the attention at today's Apple event will be on the new iPhone, what's going on behind the scenes with iCloud will affect users more. More important than the iPhone, or even iOS 5, is the arrival of cord-cutting technologies like wireless iTunes syncing, over-the-air system software updates, and most importantly, iCloud, which will allow iPhones (and iPads) to finally stand as independent computing devices. Every picture, every document. every bookmark, all your contacts will automatically be backed up online. Unlike Facebook, Google Docs, or DropBox, which require an active approach to being online, with iCloud, everything happens in the background.
23662482
submission
Lucas123 writes:
When you're paying $30,000 for a PCIe flash card, it had better demonstrate an ROI. While users are still struggling with why solid state storage cost so much, when they target the technology at the right applications, the results can be staggering. For example, when Dan Marbes, a systems engineer at Associated Bank, deployed just three SSDs for his B.I. applications, the flash storage outperformed 60 15,000rpm Fibre Channel disk drives in small-block reads. But when Marbes used the SSDs for large-block random reads and any writes, "the 60 15K spindles crushed the SSDs," he said,
23657364
submission
Dr La writes:
On request of the Dutch government an independant company (Fox-IT — no relation to the TV network whatsoever) investigated the situation at Diginotar, the hacked Dutch company at the center of the fraudulent SSL certificates scandal. The report contains some amazing observations. While the company is active in the internet security business, Diginotar was extremely sloppy regarding it's own security to internet threaths.
The report (http://www.scribd.com/doc/64011372/Operation-Black-Tulip-v1-0) mentions that:
a) No antivirus software was present on Diginotar's servers;
b) "the most critical servers" had malicious software infections;
c) The software installed on the public web servers was outdated and not patched;
d) all servers were accessible by one user/password combination, which was "not very strong and could easily be brute-forced".
Diginotar did appear to have run a firewall though.
22151824
submission
arisvega writes:
Terrafugia’s car/plane vehicle called the Transition, has received approval from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) clearing the way for delivery to customers sometime next year. Last year it received approval to fly as a “light sport aircraft” from the Federal Aviation Administration, but not before being given a special exemption to fly 110 pounds heavier than other’s in its class. This time around it had to convince the NHTSA to allow a special exemption for its Plexiglas windows and aircraft landing capable tires. The current price of $250,000 may or may not be the final price.
22151106
submission
adeelarshad82 writes:
Flying under the radar, Toshiba's Thrive tablet running Google's Android 3.1 Honeycomb is now available or pre-order on Best Buy. According to the BestBuy the tablet will come in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB versions. The tablet will be powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip, feature multi-touch and carry a 10.1 inch screen with 1280-by-800 LED display. The tablet hosts two cameras, a 2-megapixel front-facing webcam, and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera.
22150796
submission
sfcrazy writes:
One of the grips of the Android users was the lack of offline Google Maps. If you are driving across the country you need continuous Internet connectivity to download the maps of the region as you move in. Many times it happened that you lose the connectivity and now you are stranded if you need to re-navigate.
Google was expected to announce a feature which allowed users to download maps and use them offline. Google just did it. Google has added a feature in its Labs which allows users to download the map of the area they are visiting.
