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America Online

Submission + - AOL's "Dirty Little Secret": 60% of AOL's Profits (huffingtonpost.com) 4

Submitted by satuon
satuon writes: Ken Auletta's big New Yorker piece on AOL (subscription only) this week revealed an interesting detail about the company's inner workings. According to Auletta, 80% of AOL's profits come from subscribers, and 75% of those subscribers are paying for something they don't actually need.

Auletta lays out how this works:
The company still gets eighty percent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. "The dirty little secret," a former AOL executive says, "is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it."
Google

Submission + - Why Eric Schmidt left as CEO of Google? China (newyorker.com)

Submitted by Edsj
Edsj writes: It seems Eric Schmidt didn't like the decision to deliver uncensored searches in China. It is reported the decision to withdraw censored searches in China was made by co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding partner, Sergey Brin and probably an internal battle for power begun. Schmidt also wasn't happy with the “don’t be evil” policy, something the Google founders were prepared to protect anytime. Schmidt lost some energy and focus after losing the China internal battle and decided to leave the position of CEO. It is also reported that the chairman position is a temporary one until he finds another business to take care.

Submission + - Betelgeuse To Blow Up "Soon" (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by rubycodez
rubycodez writes: A wave of 2012 related hoopla has hit the internet, about the star that makes the "right shoulder" of Orion the hunter, Betelgeuse. Astronomer Phil Plait once again puts rumors to rest. The star will indeed explode as a type II supernova, and when it does it will be brighter than Venus on Earth though not as bright as the full moon. It will be visible in the night sky for weeks, as well as possibly be visible in the day sky for a short time. But that event could happen today, or 100,000 years from now or as much as a million years from now. Since Betelgeuse is over 600 light years away, its violent death will not harm Earth in any way, but definitely will provide a huge bonanza of scientific information about supernova. As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
Apple

Submission + - Apple App Store hits 10B app download mark (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The Apple App Store hit the 10 billion app download mark overnight on Friday, marking a milestone involving an awful lot of Doodle Jump, Tap Tap Revenge and Angry Birds playing, not to mention Facebook and Pandora usage. The Apple App Store hit the 1 billion mark in April of 2009, after opening in July of 2008.

Apple is rewarding the downloader of the 10 billionth free or paid App Store app with a $10,000 iTunes gift card in a bit of showmanship that Willy Wonka would be proud of. As of 7AM EST, however, Apple hadn’t publicly identified the winner, only saying that you’d need to come back later to find out who won.

Apple put an iOS app countdown ticker http://www.apple.com/itunes/10-billion-app-countdown/ on its Website last week to build buzz around the milestone and generated about 250 million app downloads since. It also revealed a list of all-time most downloaded free and paid iPhone and iPad apps. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/011911-apple-appstore-iphone-ipad-downloads.html
The Internet

Submission + - The end of the net as we know it (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: Britain’s leading ISPs are attempting to construct a two-tier internet, where websites and services that are willing to pay are thrust into the “fast lane”, while those that don’t are left fighting for scraps of bandwidth or even blocked outright. Asked directly whether ISP TalkTalk would be willing to cut off access completely to BBC iPlayer in favour of YouTube if the latter was prepared to sign a big enough cheque, TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney replied: “We’d do a deal, and we’d look at YouTube and we’d look at BBC and we should have freedom to sign whatever deal works.” Britain's biggest ISP, BT, meanwhile says it could "absolutely could see situations in which some content or application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of service above best efforts." PC Pro asks if it's the end of the net as we know it.

Comment Re:Does the droid and iPhone do this?! (Score 1) 668

by MistrBlank (#32161976) Attached to: Android Sales Surpass iPhone Sales

You really fail. I have 5 remote apps and I know I don't have even close to all of the ones available.

All so I can cover: VNC, NX, SSH, RDP and the myriad of combinations in between and through various OSes and my iPhone has NEVER been jailbroken.

The one I use the most is iSSH since it does raw VNC or tunneled through SSH and because I can write my own macros for the SSH terminal (which is handy for quick administration of services at home).

I also heavily use LogMeIn with my Mac at home.

Comment Submitter Doesn't Get It (Score 1) 224

by gyrogeerloose (#31943018) Attached to: Rumors of Hulu's Subscription Plans

As usual.

This starts pitting Hulu even more squarely against iTunes for anyone who watches more than a few shows a month.

It's not like Apple cares if Hulu competes since the company makes relatively little off of the iTMS. It exists solely to create an ecosystem that encourages the sale of Apple hardware. If the owners of other products want to buy from them as well, that's just a bit of gravy for them. If iPod/iPhone/iPad users buy from some other site, that's fine too--Apple has already made money off of them when they sold the hardware.
Data Storage

Submission + - The Hard Drive Death Watch Begins Now (gadgetopolis.com)

Submitted by gjt
gjt writes: When Intel and OCZ recently announced new "affordable" Solid State Disk drives — offering a meager 32-40GB — we initially yawned. But, then we took a closer look at the press releases and the in-progress research and development in SSD technology and opened our eyes. While the new drives aren't affordable on a cost per gigabyte basis for everyone, it does set a precedent — and most importantly a barometer price of $100. And it really does start the death clock for hard drive technology.
Advertising

Submission + - Malware delivered by Yahoo, Fox, Google ads (cnet.com)

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: CNET is reporting that Avast has tracked over 2.6 million instances of malware that have been served up to unsuspecting web surfers since last December by ad services such as Yahoo's Yield Manager, Fox Audience Network's Fimserve.com and even some from Google's DoubleClick. Some high-profile sites include The New York Times, Drudge Report.com, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed "malvertising."
I usually suspect the users of 'careless web activity' when I delouse a PC, but now I'm going to have to give some the benefit of the doubt.
Security

Submission + - The biggest cloud providers are botnets (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: Google is made up of 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwdith, according to cloud service provider Neustar. Amazon comes in second with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth, while Rackspace offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps. But these clouds are dwarfed by the likes of the really big cloud services, otherwise known as botnets. Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries, with more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth.
Space

Submission + - First flight for SpaceShip Two (msn.com)

Submitted by mknewman
mknewman writes: Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane took to the air for the first time this morning from California's Mojave Air and Space Port.

The craft, which has been christened the VSS Enterprise, remained firmly attached to its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane throughout the nearly three-hour test flight. It will take many months of further tests before SpaceShipTwo actually goes into outer space. Nevertheless, today's outing marks an important milestone along a path that could take paying passengers to the final frontier as early as 2011 or 2012.

Comment Re:Windows Joke (Score 1) 389

by JumpDrive (#31510614) Attached to: Users Rejecting Security Advice Considered Rational
Hell , I used to work for a company where part of our business was supporting Windows. We also did development. After a number of frustrating weeks with patches we switched our development over to Linux systems, because it was more reliable and we could get things done. We talked about starting to expand linux installations to customer sites, but were deeply concerned that we would lose a constant revenue stream if we did. So if we were asked, we just told customers that Linux was to difficult to install and maintain in a corporate environment and was really only good in an environment with a lot of computer geeks. They would buy it, never thinking about why our laptops were linux and if you came to our offices most of us were running linux on the desktop and occassionally the CEO would tell them our servers were running linux. The main place where we ran Windows was in the lab, so we could test issues with Windows systems.

The main thing holding linux back from adoption in coorporate and business environments is an Office Suite. Yes, there is Open Office, but it doesn't have the functionality of MS Office. The other Suite issue is compatibility. For some reason people have this notion that you can't ask other people to resend a document in a format your office suite can read. This used to happen all the time, but now when I talk to someone they act like "What are you talking about? I can't just ask someone to resend me a document using another office suite format".
NASA

Submission + - Former Astronauts: Obama Nasa Plans 'Catastrophic' (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Talking to the BBC at a private function held at the Royal Society in London, former astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan both spoke out about Obama's decision to postpone further moon missions. Lovell claimed that 'it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology', while Cernan noted he was 'disappointed' to have been the last person to land on the moon. Said Cernan: 'I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership... to seek knowledge. Curiosity's the essence of human existence.' Neil Armstrong, who was also at the event, avoided commenting on the subject.
Google

Submission + - Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation (nytimes.com)

Submitted by gollum123
gollum123 writes: Google’s efforts to expand beyond searching the Web have met with mixed success. But Google’s quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world’s largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation. in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts. It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley. Google’s service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people.

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