An underwater drone that you can control with your tablet or smartphone from up to 300 feet away. Reckon that's worth a pledge of around $200? Plenty of you did, because Ziphius is now a very real thing, thanks to its passionate everyman backers. ...
Microsoft has made a big change to its mobile phone business plan, Amri Efrati at The Information reports.
Efrati says Microsoft is in talks with Sony to start selling a Windows-based mobile phone in 2014. He says it's also in talks with Chinese handset maker ZTE.
Microsoft wants as many partners as possible to ramp up distribution and grab market share points.
To lure new partners to Microsoft's platform, Efrati says it is tweaking its business model for Windows Phone.
In the past, Microsoft would charge $10-$20 per handset, notes Efrati. Now, it's willing to charge a company nothing for "first several hundred thousand handsets sold and fee of just several dollars per handset after that," says Efrati citing a source familiar with Microsoft's negotiations.
Microsoft can afford to do this, in part, because it makes a lot of money from patent royalties on Android phone sales. Nomura estimates Microsoft rakes in $2 billion annually, almost all profit.
Money aside, Microsoft has no choice but to adapt. It's getting smoked by Google, and there's no reason for a handset maker to pay a premium for an operating system that consumers have totally ignored. Especially when the price of smartphones, even off-contract are drifting towards $100.
Join the conversation about this story »
    
|
Tens of thousands of Target gift cards have failed to activate properly, furthering the retailer's holiday shopping woes after a massive credit card hack earlier this month that affected 40 million customers.
As many as 40,000 gift cards are affected by the latest glitch, according to Fox News Minneapolis.
Target confirmed the problem to CNNMoney on Tuesday.
"We are aware that some Target gift cards were not fully activated and apologize for the inconvenience," Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder said.
She declined to say how many gift cards were affected but equated the number to less than .1% of the total number sold during the holiday season.
Customers who are unable to activate their gift cards are being asked to visit the customer service center in physical stores or call the phone number on the back of the cards.
Join the conversation about this story »
|
|
A little look into the future from Samsung.
Thanks Mike (from Spain)
Click to enlarge.
� Lake Superior contains ten percent of all the fresh water on the planet Earth.
� It covers 82,000 square kilometers or 31,700 square miles.
� The average depth is 147 meters or 483 feet.
� There have been about 350 shipwrecks recorded in Lake Superior
� Lake Superior is, by surface area, the largest lake in the world.
� A Jesuit priest in 1668 named it Lac Tracy, but that name was never officially adopted.
� It contains as much water as all the other Great Lakes combined, plus three extra Lake Erie ‘s!!
� There is a small outflow from the lake at St. Mary’s River (Sault Ste Marie) into Lake Huron , but it takes almost two centuries for the water to be completely replaced.
� There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America with water one foot deep.
� Lake Superior was formed during the last glacial retreat, making it one of the earth’s youngest major features at only about 10,000 years old.
� The deepest point in the lake is 405 meters or 1,333 feet.
� There are 78 different species of fish that call the big lake home.
� The maximum wave ever recorded on Lake Superior was 9.45 meters or 31 feet high.
� If you stretched the shoreline of Lake Superior out to a straight line, it would be long enough to reach from Duluth to the Bahamas .
� Over 300 streams and rivers empty into Lake Superior with the largest source being the Nipigon River
� The average underwater visibility of Lake Superior is about 8 meters or 27 feet, making it the cleanest and clearest of the Great Lakes .
� In the summer, the sun sets more than 35 minutes later on the western shore of Lake Superior than at its southeastern edge.
� Some of the world’s oldest rocks, formed about 2.7 billion years ago, can be found on the Ontario shore of Lake Superior ..
� It very rarely freezes over completely, and then usually just for a few hours. Complete freezing occurred in 1962, 1979, 2003 and 2009.
Thanks Gene
You can where a jaeger on your butt with these fantastic Pacfic Rim leggings. They’ve also got the main characters from the film around the calves, but not a kaiju in sight. Man, monsters bent on destroying the planet just get no respect.
See another picture after the break…
Product Page ($15.99 VeryGvia The Mary Sue)
|
|
Earlier this year, Victor Sandberg broke Missile Command's all-time world record—a mark that had stood since 1982 and was believed to be unassailable. This weekend, he shot for another goal most thought unreachable. In the end, it was.
|
|
Today, I got an e-mail regarding an IT support job I applied to. The e-mail had numerous formatting errors due to bad code, and typos all over the place. It said I wasn't qualified for the job. FML
D Glooks like a viper in the front
As a European, apart from eating double bacon cheeseburgers and drinking more coffee than ever before in your life, the best way to get the feel of the United States in to drive iconic American cars. In my case this was driving a 2014 Chevrolet Corvette while shouting 'Murica, fuck yeah!
|
|
Ever wonder why SD cards are dirt cheap? At the 2013 Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker going by the moniker Bunnie recently revealed part of the reason: “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” But that tidbit is nothing compared to the point of his presentation, in which he and fellow hacker Xobs revealed that SD cards and other flash storage formats contain programmable computers.
Bunnie also summarized his presentation in a relatively easy to understand post on his blog. The images I’m sharing here are from the slides (pdf) that he and Xobs used in their 30C3 talk. Here’s the full paragraph where Bunnie claims that flash memory is cheap because they’re unreliable: “Flash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions…”
“…This is the result of a constant arms race between the engineers and mother nature; with every fabrication process shrink, memory becomes cheaper but more unreliable. Likewise, with every generation, the engineers come up with more sophisticated and complicated algorithms to compensate for mother nature’s propensity for entropy and randomness at the atomic scale.”
Simply put, Bunnie claims that flash storage is cheap (partly) because all chips made are used, regardless of their quality. But how do flash storage makers deal with faulty hardware? With software.
Apparently flash storage manufacturers use firmware to manage how data is stored as well as to obscure the chip’s shortcomings. For instance, Bunnie claims that some 16GB chips are so damaged upon manufacture that only 2GB worth of data can be stored on them. But instead of being thrashed, they’re turned into 2GB cards instead. In order to obscure things like that – as well as to handle the aforementioned increasingly complex data abstraction – SD cards are loaded with firmware.
For their talk, Bunnie and Xobs hacked into two SD card models from a relatively small company called AppoTech. I wish I could say more about their process, but you can read about it on Bunnie’s blog…
Long story short, Bunnie and Xobs found out that the microcontrollers in SD cards can be used to deploy a variety of programs – both good and bad – or at least tweak the card’s original firmware. For instance, while researching in China, Bunnie found SD cards in some electronics shops that had their firmware modified. The vendors “load a firmware that reports the capacity of a card is much larger than the actual available storage.” The fact that those cards were modified supports Bunnie and Xobs’ claim: that other people besides manufacturers can manipulate the firmware in SD cards.
It’s worth noting that this particular investigation had an extremely small sample size. That being said, Bunnie believes that this vulnerability exists in “the whole family of “managed flash” devices, including microSD, SD, MMC as well as the eMMC and iNAND devices typically soldered onto the mainboards of smartphones and used to store the OS and other private user data. We also note that similar classes of vulnerabilities exist in related devices, such as USB flash drives and SSDs.”
Turns out the memories of our computers are as unreliable as ours.
The newest update in the highly disconcertingseries of devastating failures that is the Fukushimacleanupeffort is troubling to say the least. Tepco has confirmed that (unexplained) plumes of steam have been rising from the mangled remains of Reactor Building 3. In other words, there's a chance Fukushima could be in the middle of another meltdown.
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/iePcOEE.gif){kind=link}
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/lyckqmx.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/vMWfTjP.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/EEpaEFj.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/7WSwIwx.png){kind=link}