Nokia layoffs = Benefit for US, Sweden. Problem?
Last year, when Microsoft announced it was partnering with Nokia in Windows Phone development, it was widely expected to result in significant staff cutbacks in Nokia's research and development department. In fact, it was part of the agreement. Both Nokia and Microsoft said there would be an R&D handoff. Finland's Minister for Economic Affairs, Mauri Pekkarinen went so far as to say it would result in the biggest structural change that Finland has ever seen in the new technology sector.
Yesterday, Nokia CEO Steven Elop announced major R&D cutbacks...these 10,000 layoffs should have surprised no one.
Will Microsoft's mystery product be 'clap on, clap off' for mobile?
Cue up the rumormill for anyone's guess what Microsoft will announce at 6:30 pm EDT on Monday. I'll throw out one, inspired by software developer Robert Johnson, who occasionally writes for BetaNews (and we wish it was more often).
"If Mashable is correct and Microsoft really is gonna announce a self-manufactured tablet then it could possibly be a further refinement of the laptop that was rumored a few months ago", he speculated. "Remember how there were reports of people who had seen a device made by Asus that contained Kinect cameras?" Yes I do, and replied: "Kinect mobile has limited applications, but they're big for key enterprise markets, such as healthcare. Otherwise what have you got? 'Clap on, clap off' for PCs".
We can’t expect regulators to become our crowdfunding coaches
Last in a series. In part one, we learned how important crowd funding can be for helping tech startups and the economy. In part two, we worried about how criminals and con men might game the eventual crowdfunding system when it starts in earnest next January. And in this final part I suggest a strategy for crowdfunding success that essentially comes down to carpe diem– seize the day!
Crowdfunding done right will have a huge positive impact on any economy it touches. But by done right I mean done in a manner that maximizes impact and minimizes both corruption and unnecessary complexity. This is not something that must be accomplished specifically through strict regulation, either. I’m not opposed to regulation, just suspicious of it. I’m suspicious of any government policy that purports to be so elegant as to accomplish economic wonders at little or no cost. That just hasn’t happened in my fairly long lifetime so I see no reason to expect things to change.
Rapid Environment Editor makes useful a Windows relic
Long ago, in the days of DOS, there was no Registry where key system settings could be stored. And so variables such as, say, the location of the operating system Temporary folder were saved instead to the Environment, where they could be freely accessed by all your programs.
These days the Environment is largely a relic of the past, but it can be useful to check its contents occasionally, if only as a part of cleaning up your system. And while you can do this within Windows (right-click Computer, click Properties > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables), it’s generally much easier to use the free Rapid Environment Editor.
Apple cofounder calls Siri 'poo-poo'
It's another dress-down Friday here at BetaNews, and how could I resist dressing down Apple's Siri when cofounder Steve Wozniak makes doing so easy? Besides, I've already asserted "Siri sucks", then there is that lawsuit about the voice assistant. Speaking of Apple legal wranglings, who needs enemies when you've got friends like Woz. Surely the lawyers behind that lawsuit are drooling all over the Times Union, where the comments appeared.
Apple's misfortune: Wozniak used Siri before the iPhone maker bought the company, and he really liked the technology. He called it "pretty incredible". But no longer. "A lot of people say Siri. I say poo-poo". He gives an example. Before Apple bought Siri: "I would ask 'What are the prime numbers greater than 87?' and they would come up all in a row". Afterwards: "I'd say 'What are the prime numbers greater than 87?' And I'd get prime rib".
Polyglot 3000 is a universal translator for text
I you have some text that you’d like to get translated then there’s usually no need to know its language. Plenty of online services will do their best to automatically detect the language for you, then translate it to whatever you need. If your preferred service can’t recognize the language, though, it might be useful to have a desktop alternative like Polyglot 3000 to hand.
The program’s design is very straightforward, and works exactly as you’d expect. Just paste your sample text into Polyglot (or enter it manually, or open it in a plain text file), click the “Recognize language” button, and the program will deliver its report. Which usually means naming the most likely language for this sample (currently 474 are supported), and providing a Recognition Accuracy estimate to let you know how reliable this verdict might be.
Western Digital branches out into routers with new My Net products
Western Digital has been around for decades, and is known primarily for its storage solutions. Thursday, WD unveiled a new line of home networking products that show the company's continued interest in personal media management and entertainment, a relatively small segment of their product line that currently includes the the WDTV product line and My Passport AV line.
The new My Net line includes five differently-equipped dual-band routers and an 8-port network switch which range from $79 to $350 in cost.
IDC will finally count Windows tablets with iPads and Androids
Hopefully, Gartner and other analyst firms will show as much sense.
Windows tablets have gotten the shaft from IDC and other analyst firms for far too long. They count the devices as PCs, not tablets. Last year, after Gartner's tablet forecast failed to include Windows, several prominent bloggers fanned the flames of misinformation, wrongly concluding Microsoft's OS would have no share by 2015. Today, IDC issued a new forecast that still ignores Windows tablets, but changes are promised.
Amazon improves customer support options for AWS customers
Amazon has expanded its support options for its Amazon Web Services cloud offering, giving better free support to all customers and reducing the pricing of paid support tiers. The company is also renaming the paid tiers to better represent its target customers.
These tiers had been named Bronze, Gold and Platinum -- they are now referred to as Developer, Business, and Enterprise. Amazon expanded its paid support options back in January, and added third-party support and Trusted Advisor services in beta to its Gold and Platinum support levels. Thursday's moves take these offerings out of beta, and makes the higher-level support options affordable to a wider range of AWS customers.
Broken trust: Nation-state malware has a negative impact on GDP
The slow drip of revelations about Flame have kept this piece of malware in the news for more than two weeks so it is worth reminding people that most antivirus programs now protect against Flame (ESET products detect it as Win32/Flamer.A). The coverage of Flame was boosted last week by a conveniently-timed assist from leaks that put Stuxnet back in the headlines.
Frankly, many antivirus experts were underwhelmed by reports that anonymous officials in the US. government were asserting that the industrial-sabotage malware known as Stuxnet was developed as part of attacks on Iran's industrial infractructure sanctioned by the President of the United States (a lot of us already assumed that was the case). There has also been a longstanding presumption of Israeli involvement in Stuxnet and so it was no surprise to hear "Stuxnet is our baby; Obama disclosed it for his reelection campaign" coming from Mossad agents. The third unsurprising revelation is that part of the Flame code is nearly identical to code found in Stuxnet.
Get ready for Microsoft mystery Monday
Say, it must be vacation time. The folks from Redmond, Wash. will trek to Los Angeles for a mysterious June 18 event. It's the right month to soak up Southern California sun. Timing surely isn't coincidental -- a week following Apple's swaggering MacBook Pro with Retina Display, iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion announcements and 9 days before Google's developer conference commences. Apple and Google chose San Francisco venues, while Microsoft will get its people out of the clouds into some blue skies (well, once the Marine layer blows off). I'm all for LA, since it's driving distance from San Diego. Not that I received an invitation.
But others who got one have shared the details, of which there are none. Microsoft is being uncharacteristically cagey, a corporate cultural quality that is in too short supply up North. Nothing builds buzz like mystery. With Apple's announcements behind, and Google I/O too far away, Microsoft has given bloggers, commenters, reporters and other pundits something to speculate about. Oh, what could it be?
Acer Aspire S5, the ultrabook with the weird I/O trapdoor, comes this month at $1399
Acer America on Thursday announced the price and availability of the Aspire S5-391-9880 ultrabook. This particular PC stands out from the mass of selfsame thin and light PCs because of the interesting design Acer used to hide the machine's extra USB, HDMI and Thunderbolt ports.
With a thickness ranging from 0.44 inches at its thinnest point to 0.59 inches at its thickest, The S5 isn't the thinnest ultrabook going, and at 2.65 lbs, it's not the lightest. Nor is it the most powerful, capacious, or flashy, with a 3rd Generation Intel Core i7-35i7U ("Ivy Bridge") processor, a 256GB solid state drive, and a 13.3 inch (1366 x 768) backlit LED screen, a common feature to many Ultrabooks.
Skype 5.8 for Mac and 5.10 for Windows offer small changes with big impact
Skype has just launched Skype 5.10 for Windows, and 5.8 for Mac, and both releases contain small but worthwhile tweaks that should make the upgrade worthwhile.
The Windows client sensibly merges the Facebook and Skype contacts into a single Contacts list, for instance. And if you’ve so many friends and colleagues that it becomes tricky to manage, no problem: it’s now possible to pin your most important contacts to the top, so they’re always immediately accessible.
Nokia stock collapses after announcing massive layoffs
It is a dark day for the employees of the world's most-recognized phone maker in Espoo, Finland. Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, announced today that 10,000 positions will be made redundant by the end of 2013. In what is being called part of a strategy to rescale Nokia's operations after terrible losses over the past four quarters, offices in Finland, Germany and Canada will close. Also executives Niklas Savander, Mary McDowell, and Jerri DeVard will step down.
The market reacted swiftly and painfully, driving down Nokia's share price about 18 percent to $2.30. In early trading, Nokia shares dropped their greatest percentage in 11 years.
0 A.D. raises the game for open-source RTS
Open-source RTS games aren’t generally known for having quality graphics, even when finished, so you probably wouldn’t expect too much from an alpha build. Which is why 0 A.D. is a real surprise, thanks to visuals that are more impressive than many commercial products.
Okay, it’s true, the program has been in alpha for a very long time (running on Windows, the Mac and Linux must make for a complex development process), but the attention to detail is still impressive. Your citizens are people, not anonymous blobs. Buildings look as though like people live in them, with seating areas, pots and vases scattered around. And they live in a realistic and complex world, so for instance a desert will have sand, rocks, animals, perhaps palm trees which cast true shadows.
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