Deriziotis

submitted by Silound
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submitted by ani625
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This is a sort of hardware / software announcement for Spotify, a hardware partnership with a number of big names in audio like Philips, Pioneer, Bang & Olufsen, Denon, Marantz and Yamaha that allows you to keep the party going on those Spotify playlists. Start playing one on your handset, click play on a compatible speaker system, and it will keep streaming on the speaker without interruption -- even when you take a call or leave the vicinity of your WiFi network. The audio system will actually start streaming music directly from the cloud. That means you can, say, turn on an iPad in another room and let your party guests skip songs -- though, granted, that might not be the greatest idea, depending on who you invite.

Specific devices have yet to be named, though compatible systems will be branded with a Spotify Connect logo, so you'll know what you're getting yourself into. Those should be arriving in a late-October / early-November timeframe. Spotify will be holding up its end of the bargain by rolling out a software update for iOS ahead of those launches. Android and other operating systems will be receiving it at a later date.

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After helping Lenovo thrive in the wretched PC industry -- while also making it the number one Chinese smartphone maker -- CEO Yang Yuanqing earned a sizeable bonus. And like last year, he's sharing the wealth with front-line employees, giving $3.25 million of his $14.6 million salary to 10,000 workers in 20 countries. Lenovo grabbed a record $34 billion during its last fiscal year, along with an all-time high $653 million in profit. While the sum he shared may be small compared to that, it's almost a month's pay for the 85 percent who work in China. And we can't say we've seen too many CEOs stateside willing to part with their personal private jet fuel stash.

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Lenovo

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Source: Bloomberg

Internet giant Yahoo closed its news and community services in China at the weekend, according to local media.

The world reacts to the crisis in Syria

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submitted by memoryfailure
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The cheapest unlocked stock Android phone you could buy just got even cheaper: Google has dropped the price of the Nexus 4 8GB to $199 (£159) from $299 (£239), and the 16GB model to $249 (£199) from $349 (£279). It's fast approaching the anniversary date of the latest Google phone, so the timing is about right for the discount. However, we do wonder if this means a replacement is nigh. After all, Google has yet to introduce the next Nexus successor, and we certainly don't think the Moto X is all the Mountain View company has to offer. Until then, the Nexus 4 is pretty much the best deal for stock Android lovers who hate carrier contracts. So if you feel like snatching one up, you had best hit the store link below before it sells out yet again.

Update: The Google Play Twitter account just sent out a tweet stating that the 25 percent discount applies not only in the US, but also Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, Korea and the UK. We've embedded the tweet after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google, LG

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Source: Google Play Store, Google Play (Twitter)

Sophisticated sex dolls and toys have been around for quite some time now, with Real Dolls having been on the market since 1996. These dolls, though, are just that -- dolls -- and are generally static; nowhere near the level of sophistication science fiction would have you believe the world of robot companionship could have. However, one company is working on robotizing sex dolls, and has created the most sophisticated unit to date.

Instagram, Netflix, Vine and Airbnb are all hit by software problems at one of Amazon's data centres.

submitted by tarballs_are_good
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The US soldier convicted of handing a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website Wikileaks is sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The founder of an award-winning legal news site gives up on the project, saying she cannot operate under current US surveillance policies.

Another checkmark in our road towards a totalitarian society: government intimidating the free press, destroying materials, and threatening to take them to court - to shut down a newspaper. No joke. The British government demanded that The Guardian hand over all materials related to Edward Snowden so that they could be destroyed. If the newspaper did not comply, the British government would go to court to shut down The Guardian. The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more." During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. The newspaper told the government that even if they did comply, it would be pointless - all the materials related to Snowden had already been spread throughout the world, the actual editing was done in New York, the journalist in question (Greenwald) lived in Brazil - but the British government stood fast. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro. Yeah.

So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate. I'm really sorry that it's so. I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint. Quaint indeed. Groklaw is shutting down. A huge loss, as the site's contributions to various ridiculous lawsuits, like the SCO one about Linux, or the even crazier one from Oracle about Java, were invaluable. The reasons are sound, though - without secure, private communications, the collaborative effort that is Groklaw cannot function. A sad day.

submitted by -Gavin-
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Don't worry. The drought of Hitler jokes won't last forever.

submitted by icefall5
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submitted by Tuber_Maculatum
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The Washington Post says Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has agreed to purchase the company's flagship newspaper for $250m (£163m).

submitted by Kylde
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Who knew affordable tablets could be so good? That was our reaction after reviewing the original Nexus 7 when it went on sale last year for $200; at the time, comparably specced products were going for at least $100 more. So, when this year's follow-up came out at a slightly higher price ($229 and up), we were a little concerned the higher cost would dissuade penny-pinching shoppers from taking the plunge.

After we got a good look at the spec sheet, though, we quickly forgave Google and ASUS for their decision. For the money, you get a gorgeous 1,920 x 1,200 IPS display, 2GB of RAM, a rear camera, a quad-core processor, wireless charging and the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean 4.3. Now that we've had the opportunity to take the new and improved Nexus 7 for a spin, we're ready to tackle all the obvious questions: is this still the best budget tablet on the market? How does it compare to the iPad mini? And does the spec sheet actually reflect real-world performance? Let's find out.

Filed under: Tablets, ASUS, Google

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One of the largest video game space battles ever seen has taken place in the Eve Online game.

Netflix's push into original content has received its latest positive feedback from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, netting 14 nominations for the 65th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Most of those went to standout series House of Cards, which was nominated for Most Outstanding Drama, with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright nominated for outstanding lead actor and actress awards. The fourth season of Arrested Development also received recognition with three nominations, while Hemlock Grove is on the list for two. Netflix will need to launch a few more hits if it wants to pass other players in the entertainment space (HBO's Game of Thrones received 16 nominations by itself while the network totaled 108, for example), but with these first-ever nominations for streaming content, it's off to a good start.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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submitted by mepper
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Nokia shares fall after the mobile phone maker reports a 24% drop in sales during the second quarter.

I’ve been carefully tracking my personal finances for the past 8 years or so (using my own software, wxBanker), and thought it would be a fun exercise to analyze the graph of my savings or “net worth” over this entire period. Each period was surprisingly different!

The green line is my actual total savings, while the blue line is just a 2nd degree best-fit line that you can ignore. Take a look at how the slope noticeably changes for each period! Let’s look at each of the segments.

1: College

This was a very frugal part of my life. I was very fortunate not to have much tuition obligation due to financial aid, a large academic scholarship, and a generous family. So what you see here is me scraping savings together, not always outpacing the cost of rent, books, and food. The two humps were paid internships which RIT called “co-ops”.

 

2: My first job and the Bay Area

After college I took an offer at a startup in California (Genius.com). The graph here is oddly linear, despite a couple raises. Perhaps I just spent the extra money on more frozen yogurt. After 2 years at this job, I along with the majority of the engineering team was laid off. The change was welcome, and I used the severance to interview full-time. I found a much smaller “pre-A” start-up, Canvas Networks, and took the job, which required a move to NYC.

3: Canv.as and the Big Apple

The growth of savings here makes a steep change for the worse. Taking a decent pay cut (the understandable cost of working at 4 person company where I could get >1% equity), plus moving to the most expensive city in the country are the main causes. There’s a lot more volatility as well, likely from things such as broker’s fees and having to pay overlapping rent on two apartments for a month while I moved.

While I did end up getting raises that eventually brought me well beyond my previous salary at Genius, they were put entirely towards moving out of a windowless sublet into my own nice, sunny apartment. After a year at Canv.as I decided the full-time life wasn’t for me, and quit to become a part-time freelancer.

4: Michael Rooney Inc and the part-time life

Here is where things get really interesting: I went from working about 50 hours a week to working no more than 10 hours per week, and I started saving more. After I started freelancing and had the choice to work as much or little as I wanted, I decided I’d prefer to work the “lowest responsible amount”. In other words, figure out my full budget including rent, food, health care, still saving money, etc, and just work enough to earn that much (after taxes). Freelancing 10 hours a week ended up being a 40% pay cut, but it was a great trade for an 80%+ hours cut.

But why am I saving more now? First, my expenses were dramatically reduced because my girlfriend and I moved in together, halving my rent and utilities. This alone is about $1,200/mo, $14,400/year, which used to require an extra $20K in earnings to support after losing a third of it to taxes. Having enough time to cook, which I love, also saved me from buying breakfast and dinner multiple times a week. This was easily costing me an extra $100/week, ~5K/year, again requiring about $7.5K in salary to support due to taxes.

Doing business as an S Corporation also meant a lot of my normal expenses became tax-deductible (a home office deduction was huge), and my effective tax rate itself was also lowered due to being able to (perfectly legally) take much of my profits from the company as a distribution instead of personal pay, avoiding some taxes on that portion of income.

For me, working part-time also meant less burn-out, meaning fewer expenses related to entertainment, drinks, and vacations required to “decompress”, etc. Finally, since about 80% of my money is in stocks / mutual funds, the recent market rally also helped a lot.

UPDATE: By popular request (of one person) here is the same graph that does not include gains or losses in the market. It is fairly similar except that the bumps and dips are larger as the total amount is less, and the freelance slope is not as significant, but luckily still noticeably better. I chose a linear trend curve here to make that a little easier to tell:

For what is worth, bank interest currently accounts for 2% of my total savings, and capital gains/losses for 18%.

Wow, you read it all, maybe! Do you do any kind of analytics, budgeting, or financial retrospectives, or am I the only one?

 

Kernel hacker Sarah Sharp has stood up against the way of communication common on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. I have quite a few thoughts about this, and I thought I’d share them here. Quoting Sarah:

I’m standing up against verbal abuse on LKML. I will happily stand alone, however you can also support this cause. Please speak up, either here on Google+ by resharing this post, or commenting on this post with words of support. If you dare, you can also reply to my lkml email.

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137390362508794&w=2

Thanks for posting this, Sarah. You’re bringing up an important topic here, which is avoided all too often.

Sarah is completely right, and entitled to demand an abuse-free working environment. Thank you for making this explicit, and standing up against those that think it’s not necessary. You’re speaking for a silent crowd, that is now not so silent anymore.

If people really think they can only be productive when using abusive language, they need a reality check and grow up, especially if these people are highly regarded personalities such as Linus Torvalds. What they do is settings a bad example at best, and being actively harmful and divisive at worst.

I wouldn’t care much if that this abusive behavior were happening in their private living room, but in a public place that is not acceptable. It harms our whole community. It cultivates a macho culture of fat white men, while what we really need is diversity.

Within KDE, we have created a culture of friendliness and mutual respect. We have codified this in a code of conduct, and it has grown into the baseline for making work and leisure in the community more fun and less stressful. It also allows us to grow beyond an in-bred bunch of geeks, and become a diverse team, with the skills needed to not just create Free Software, but to contribute to Free Culture (which I think Free software is part of).

Food for thought: If we want Asian hardware manufacturers to work with us on, e.g. drivers for their hardware, and do it upstream, it simply won’t happen in a rude atmosphere that is entirely incompatible with Asian culture (where critique has to be much more subtile). Of course it’s a general problem with cultural diversity.

Nokia's latest handset features a 41 megapixel camera, allowing owners to "shoot first, zoom later" without sacrificing image quality.