Intel claims Haswell will offer 50% more battery life in laptops
Intel's upcoming family of Core processors, code-named Haswell, will offer 50% more battery life in laptops than did their "Ivy Bridge" predecessors, Intel said on Thursday.
Haswell chips were designed with laptops and tablets in mind, and the main focus was on lowering power consumption, said Rani Borkar, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in a media briefing.
The longer battery life won't come with a cost to performance, according to Borkar. And in idle or standby mode the chips will do even better, extending battery life by up to 20 times, she said.
The improvements are vital for Intel and its PC-making partners. PC sales are in one of their worst slumps ever, with users snapping up tablets and smartphones instead for mobile computing. Any improvements Intel can offer will help keep the PC market alive. Read more...
Apple: No tax gimmick left behind
Tim Cook did Steve Jobs proud at this week's Congressional hearings into Apple's tax avoidance practices. During his testimony the CEO pulled a mind trick or two out of his iPocket, rivaling even the late Apple visionary in his ability to weave reality distortion fields.
The Senate report released prior to Cook's testimony detailed Apple's "complex web" of offshore entities set up to avoid paying taxes. Yet in his testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Apple's CEO defended the company, saying Apple uses "no tax gimmicks."
Puhleeze -- long before the world was swooning over iPhones and iPads, Apple pioneered the accounting sleight of hand known as "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich." A New York Times in-depth report this week traced the ways Apple, starting in the 1980s, has acted to avoid paying taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands, then to the Caribbean. Read more...
Chinese hackers resume attacks on U.S. targets
For the last three months or so, the U.S. government and some of its defense contractors have engaged in a war of shame on China to pressure it to cool its cyber attacks on U.S. targets. The campaign appeared to be yielding results, but it seems that Chinese hackers were only catching their breath.
The notorious Unit 61398, also known as the "Comment Crew," -- an elite cyber unit linked by U.S. security firms to the China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) -- has renewed its raids on U.S. entities using different techniques, the New York Times has reported.
Cyber security firm Mandiant told the Times that the attacks had been renewed, but would not identify the targets -- although it did acknowledge that many of them were the same ones assaulted earlier by the Chinese cyber unit.
Mandiant did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Read more...
Intel releases ‘Beacon Mountain’ Android-on-Atom dev tool
Indroid Inside Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery.
Beacon Mountain emerged over the weekend, promising “productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools for apps targeting … smartphones and tablets.”
The software's in version 0.5 and runs on Windows 7 or 8. A Mac version is promised and doesn't look far off: one of the demos in the Intel video about the software below runs on a Mac (and doesn't look like it is in a virtual machine). Read more...
Senate report: Apple claims subsidiaries with no taxing jurisdiction
Apple has set up three foreign subsidiaries that the company claims are not resident in any nation for taxing purposes, in an effort to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars in taxes to the U.S. and other countries, according to a new report from a U.S. Senate subcommittee.
Apple has set up a "complex web" of offshore entities to avoid paying taxes, with some subsidiaries set up in low-tax Ireland, according to a report released Monday by the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
One of the subsidiaries set up by Apple has paid no corporate income tax to any nation for the past five years, although it reported US$30 billion in net income from 2009 to 2012, the report said. Another subsidiary has paid a tax rate to Ireland of one-tenth of 1 percent or less in 2009, 2010 and 2011, far below the normal Irish corporate income tax rate of 12 percent, according to the subcommittee report. Read more...
Microsoft conceals job ad in Bing homepage
Microsoft are looking for a new Bing developer - but you'll need to be pretty smart to apply. Oh, and you can only use Internet Explorer, which rules a fair number of applicants out.
Visitors to the Bing homepage are currently greeted with a weird blue environment of some sort as the background to the search bar. But rich rewards are on offer for the searcher who looks beyond the surface of the blue-and-grey floatyness.
If you're using Internet Explorer and have enabled the browser debug settings*, a small message pops up containing the words: "Do you want to debug this webpage?" Read more...
Progress at Foxconn factories, but working hours still exceed Chinese laws
Employees at the Chinese factories of Apple supplier Foxconn continue to work beyond the country's legal limit of 49 hours a month, according to a report from the Fair Labor Association (FLA). But the Taiwanese manufacturer is making overall steady progress in improving the working conditions at a select group of factories in China, it said.
The report released Thursday is the latest audit from the FLA, which has been tasked by Apple to monitor the working conditions at three Foxconn factories in the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Chengdu that produce iPad and iPhone products. Since the initial audits were carried out in February of last year, the factories have instituted new changes, including enforcing breaks for workers and stopping student interns from logging overtime hours. Read more...
Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox
Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."
The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Mozilla has been testing a patch from Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford University in computer science and law and online privacy activist, which like Apple's Safari browser allows cookies from websites already visited, but blocks cookies from sites not visited yet. Read more...
H-1B politics shifts to backroom as vote nears
High-tech's leading advocate in the immigration bill fight, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), has bought himself some time, perhaps until Tuesday, to try get the immigration bill changed to the liking of the tech industry.
Negotiations are underway to come up with a compromise where Hatch gets a block of amendments and, in return, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), gets Hatch's support for the entire immigration bill, according to sources.
Schumer is one of the leaders of the so-called "gang of eight," the bipartisan group that developed the comprehensive immigration bill.
If Hatch had enough support for his amendments on Senate Judiciary Committee, he could have asked for a vote. But he didn't have the votes. Read more...
Acer’s new Aspire R7 laptop: Innovation for its own sake?
Innovation is a good thing -- unless it is innovation for its own sake. Acer's new Aspire R7 touchscreen laptop may fall into that latter category.
When he introduced Acer's new line of systems today, the company's chairman and CEO J.T. Wang started by talking about duality -- the use of both touch and type in a single device. I can't disagree with him -- when I spent some time with Microsoft's Surface with Windows RT a little while back, I found myself using the touch screen a lot more often than I thought I would. Read more...
Facebook rethinks its ‘hackathons’ with an eye toward mobile
Facebook is retooling its famous "hackathon" all-night coding workshops to give engineers more time to conceive new products, hopefully with a focus on mobile.
The hackathons, a longstanding event at the company where "hacking" is central to the corporate mantra, have previously run as anything-goes, all-night workshops in which employees think up new product concepts and develop rough prototypes. If they impress, those prototypes sometimes end up as commercial products.
Some of Facebook's most popular features, including the "Like" button, Timeline and Chat, were conceived during hackathons, so they play an important role. Read more...
Rare working Apple-1 computer to hit auction block this month
A German auctioneer will put a working Apple-1 computer on the block later this month, and expects the handmade computer to fetch between $261,000 and $392,000 at Thursday's exchange rate.
The record price for an Apple-1 was $640,000, paid last year in an auction also run by Breker, of Cologne, Germany.
Opera sues designer for leaking trade secrets to Mozilla
Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has filed suit against Trond Werner Hansen, one of its former developers, alleging that Hansen took trade secrets with him when he went to work with Opera rival Mozilla.
As first reported by The Next Web, Hansen worked at Opera from 1999 through 2006. There he led design and UI development, first for the Windows version of the Opera browser, then for the cross-platform Desktop version. He later returned as an independent consultant from 2009 to 2010, at Opera's request.
Then in 2012, Hansen began to work with the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the open source Firefox browser – and that's when things got dicey. Read more...
Samsung Galaxy S4 vs. HTC One and Nexus 4: Which should you get?
Decisions, decisions, decisions.
No question about it: We're entering one of the busiest times of the year for new Android arrivals. And with options like Samsung's Galaxy S4, HTC's One, and Google's LG-made Nexus 4 now competing for your attention, it can get a little tricky to figure out which device is the right one for you.
So where to begin? This step-by-step guide should help you figure it out. Think carefully about the following prompts, then put your answers together and see what you get.
(You can also check out a side-by-side view of the devices' key specs by clicking the chart below; that's good information to have, but remember that numbers only tell half the story.) Read more...
Apple tops Consumer Reports survey on PC tech support
If you're looking to keep that computer running smoothly, Apple is the one to turn to, says Consumer Reports. On Monday, the consumer advocacy publication announced that the company from Cupertino had once again topped a reader survey of the best computer tech support, even going so far as to beat its own scores from the previous year.
To the surprise of nobody who's actually paid attention to the PC market in the last several years, Apple beat out competitors Lenovo, Asus, Dell, Toshiba, Hewlett Packard/Compaq, and Acer/Gateway/eMachines by a healthy margin, scoring an 86 out of 100, which the publication describes as "very satisfied." The next closest brand was Lenovo, which scored only a 63, or "fairly well satisfied." Read more...