Archive for June, 2011

AT&T: Meet the New US GSM Monopoly

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

itwbennett writes "Why should consumers care about the AT&T/T-mobile merger? Already, Verizon has dropped unlimited data plans and the US trails Japan, South Korea, and others in variety and performance of mobiles. Don't think for a second that those aren't the direct result this new monopoly, says blogger Tom Henderson. ...

The Science of Human-Robot Love

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

An anonymous reader writes "By harnessing a new sphere of science called 'lovotics', Hooman Samani, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Social Robotics Lab at the National University of Singapore, believes it is possible to engineer love between humans and robots. Samani's robots have artificial psychological and biological systems that ...

IBM Creates Multi-Bit Phase Change Memory

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Lucas123 writes "In what is likely to be a strong rival to NAND flash memory, IBM today announced it has been able to successfully store more than one bit of data per cell in a more stable non-volatile memory called phase-change memory (PCM). Unlike NAND, Previously, PCM couldn't contend with ...

Spamming Becoming Financially Infeasible

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

itwbennett writes "Making money in spam isn't as easy as it used to be. 'It's not something financially feasible for anyone to even consider,' said Robert Soloway, who in his heyday made $20,000/day as a spammer. 'Spam — the Internet's original sin — dropped for the first time ever at ...

Lawsuit Claims LegalZoom Is Practicing Law Without a License

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Bob the Super Hamste writes "Fortune has an interesting piece about a federal class action law suit against LegalZoom claiming that its software is illegally practicing law without a license. The law suit seeks to recover money from LegalZoom for every resident in Missouri who has used LegalZoom regardless of ...

Electronic Skin Gives Robots a Sense of Touch

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Zothecula writes "Providing robots with sensory inputs is one of the keys to the development of more capable and useful machines. Sight and hearing are the most common senses bestowed upon our mechanical friends, but even taste and smell have gotten a look. There have also been a number of ...

Facebook More Hated Than Banks, Utilities

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

jfruhlinger writes "According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook raises a lot of ire among its customers — more than Bank of America or AT&T Mobility. This bodes ill for the company — as blogger Chris Nerney points out, many of the others on the most-hated list are utilities ...

AMD Llano APU Review - Slow CPU, Fast GPU

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Vigile writes "Though we did see the fruits of AMD's Fusion labor in the form of the Brazos platform late in 2010, Llano is the first mainstream part to be released that combines traditional x86 CPU cores with Radeon-based SIMD arrays for a heterogeneous computing environment. The A-series of APUs ...

Los Alamos Fire Idles NSA Supercomputer

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

ygslash writes "Among the many facilities shut down since Monday at Los Alamos National Laboratory due to the approaching wildfire is Cielo, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The National Nuclear Security Administration's three national laboratories - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore - all share computing ...

Amazon Drops California Associates to Avoid Sales Tax

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

PCM2 writes "Residents of California who participate in the Amazon Associates Program received an email warning them that the program will be terminated as soon as a new California law goes into effect. The law, which CA governor Jerry Brown signed, would require online retailers to collect sales tax on ...