Apple’s purchase of Anobit would give it a leg up on rivals
Apple's buyout of Israel-based solid-state drive (SSD) manufacturer Anobit Technologies will give the company a significant technological boost in the mobile market, and the deal could yield huge cost savings.
Apple is the industry's largest NAND flash consumer, so acquiring Anobit gives it a means of addressing the reliability problems that arise as solid-state memory shrinks in size.
According to published reports, Apple will pay around $500 million for Anobit. It sees the purchase of a NAND flash technology developer as key to its product strategy going forward. The acquisition of Anobit would be Apple's largest purchase since it bought NeXT in 1996. NeXT, which produced high-end workstations, was founded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs after he was fired from Apple in 1985. Read more...
Where the tech workers are (map)
Maryland has the highest concentration of technical workers of any state in the U.S., while Mississippi has the lowest, according to data from the annual American Community Survey (ACS) released this fall.
The term "technical workers" counts those employed in a computer, engineering or science job as a portion of the overall adult civilian workforce.
Other states with high portions of tech workers after Maryland at 8.6% are: Virginia 8.0%, Washington state 7.5%, Massachusetts 7.3% and Colorado 7.0%. The U.S. average is 5.2%. Washington, D.C., came in at 9.6% with a 1.0% margin of error. Read more...
Intel tries to keep netbooks alive with new Atom chips
Intel on Wednesday started shipping the latest Atom chips for netbooks, an important step to sustain growth of the low-cost PCs in the wake of the tablet onslaught.
The dual-core chips, part of the platform code-named Cedar Trail, bring better battery life and overall improved performance to netbooks, Intel said in a statement. Top PC makers, including Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus and Samsung will ship netbooks with Cedar Trail chips beginning in January starting at US$199.
Intel has doubled graphics performance on the chips while reducing power consumption by up to 20 percent compared to Atom predecessors introduced two years ago, the company said. The new chips will help netbooks provide up to 10 hours of battery life on one charge, Intel said. Read more...
Spire crack brings Siri to jailbroken iPhones
Siri, Apple’s much loved or otherwise personal assistant, can be accessed by jailbroken iPhones using an application dubbed Spire, says noted cracker Chpwn.
The Spire crack, posted on Cyndia, enables the download of Siri code from Apple’s servers - which takes around 100MB so Chpwn recommends Wi-Fi use. Once installed, the code requires activation via a proxy server using the credentials of an iPhone 4S – a problem encountered by other Siri cracks that want to stay on the right side of Apple’s legal team. Read more...
Jobs’ ‘nuclear war’ is not doing Apple any good – analyst
Apple's patent wars will start to hurt shareholders if Apple continues to pursue its lawsuits against Samsung, HTC and Motorola, an analyst has said.
Kevin Rivette, a managing partner at 3LP Advisors LLC, told Bloomberg that even if Apple won its patent battles, it was playing a losing game. Legal fees aside, the "thermonuclear war" that Jobs launched against the Android manufacturers in a fit of rage circa 2009 isn't stamping out Cupertino's competition but the hostility engendered could stop Apple from getting access to new technology it needs. Read more...
Cloud adviser: Where’s your data?
With cloud computing, technology has advanced more quickly than the law's ability to effectively address its implications.
Consider the U.S. Patriot Act. It was recently revealed that U.S.-based cloud providers may have to comply with Patriot Act requests for data that's located in a provider's European data centers, even though this conflicts with the European Union's 1995 Data Protection Directive.
In response to that conflict, the European Commission recently announced that it plans to propose reforms to the EU directive by the end of January 2012.
Of course, cloud computing was not even a buzzword when the directive was first formulated in 1995. But all of this serves as a good reminder to ensure that your cloud-computing contract effectively addresses issues associated with data location and legal requests for data access. Read more...
China to launch GPS alternative with own Beidou system
China on Tuesday began offering its own satellite navigation system to users, as an effort to move away from the nation's reliance on the U.S.-built NAVSTAR GPS network.
On Tuesday, the country announced details of its Beidou system, which means Big Dipper in English, and already operates by using 10 Chinese satellites in orbit. China plans to enhance the system at the end of 2012 when six additional satellites go into operation.
China said building its own satellite navigation system was necessary in order to further economic development, according to Ran Chengqi, a spokesman for the Beidou system. "If there is no independent control of the satellite navigation system, the security of China's economic and social development lacks dependable protection," he said during a Tuesday media briefing posted online. Read more...
Apple 2012 rumor: iTV Q2, iPad 3 Q1, iPhone 5 Q4
The Apple [AAPL] future product road map seems a little more clear following a series of revelations across the Christmas weekend, revelations which suggest an iPad 3 model in February, a summer time Apple TV unit and the later introduction of the iPhone 5 just in time for Christmas 2012. Let's take a look at the pack.
Those recent Apple TV rumors
I think the rumor mill has churned this one around sufficiently that we're all expecting an Apple television next year. Now Digitimes tells us that manufacturers have begun ramping-up production for the components used inside the device, which is expected to go into production in Q1 2012.
"The supply chain of Apple will start preparing materials for iTV sets in the first quarter of 2012 in order to meet Apple's schedule to launch the new display products in the second or the third quarter of 2012, according to industry sources." Read more...
IT managers are aloof, insular, says psychologist
IT managers and their staffs are different from the rest of us.
They view the world in terms of "us against them" and see others in an organization as pests or threats to their IT universe, says Billie Blair, who holds a doctorate in organizational psychology and heads Change Strategist Inc., a Los Angeles-based management consulting firm.
Organizational psychologists have an understanding of management and psychology. They use that knowledge to help firms and organizations understand behaviors that can impinge on the ability to implement required changes, said Blair.
Blair also has the perspective of having once overseen an IT department as a former dean of the College of Psychology and Human Services at California State University.
Blair looks at the performance of an entire organization, including IT, and draws observations from that work.
IT managers see themselves as "reigning supreme," says Blair, but they are also capable of having a dramatic impact. In an interview with Computerworld, she outlines various personnel and organizational issues facing IT executives. Read more...