2012年11月8日星期四

Samsung Delays New Fab Over Apple Uncertainty


The Apple-Samsung war may have a casualty. Samsung has reportedly delayed building a planned logic fabrication facility as it digests the possibility of losing out on future chip orders from Apple.

Samsung "is likely to put off the construction" of its Line-17 fab in Hwaseong, South Korea, DigiTimesreported Tuesday. The Taiwanese tech journal cited unnamed industry sources as saying that Samsung "will no longer be the sole supplier of Apple-designed chips that power [next-generation] iPhone and iPad devices.
Apple has turned to Samsung to supply it with ARM-based application processors of Apple's own design that have been used in several generations of iOS-based devices. But of late, the two companies have been squaring off in courts around the world over patent disputes involving Apple's iDevices and Samsung's Android-based smartphones and tablets.
That's led to speculation that Apple would seek to limit Samsung's huge role in its supply chain for future devices. Indeed, teardowns of the recently released fouth-generation iPad and iPad mini have revealed that memory once supplied by Samsung is now being provided by other suppliers, at least in some cases, though it appears that the AX-series chips in those tablets and the new iPhone 5 are still being fabbed by the South Korean company.
DigiTimes reported that the total bill for Line-17's construction has been estimated at between $3.7 billion and $5.5 billion. The facility, which would have capacity to produce 80,000 12-inch wafers on the 20nm and 14nm process nodes per month, had been targeted to begin volume production in the first quarter of 2014, according to the tech journal.
Samsung announced plans to build the fab this past June and had planned to complete construction by the end of next year. But uncertainty about future Apple orders has prompted Samsung "to consider slowing the pace of its logic-IC capacity expansion," according to sources cited by DigiTimes.

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2012年11月4日星期日

Florida Early Voting Fiasco: Voters Wait For Hours At Polls As Rick Scott Refuses To Budge


WASHINGTON -- Once again, Florida and its problems at the polls are at the center of an election.




Early voting is supposed to make it easier for people to carry out their constitutional right. Tuesdays are notoriously inconvenient to take off work, so many states have given voters the option of turning out on weekends or other weekdays in the run-up to Election Day.
But in Florida this year, it has been a nightmare for voters, who have faced record wait times, long lines in the sun and a Republican governor, Rick Scott, who has refused to budge and extend early voting hours.
"People are getting out to vote. That's what's very good," said Scott.
People are getting out to vote -- but many of them are having to wait in line for three or four hours to do so. One contributor to DailyKos claimed it took 9 hours to vote. In Miami-Dade on Saturday, people who had gotten in line by 7:00 p.m. were allowed to vote; the last person wasn't checked in until 1 a.m., meaning it took some individuals six hours to cast a ballot.
"We're looking at an election meltdown that is eerily similar to 2000, minus the hanging chads," said Dan Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida.
Miami-Dade attempted to deal with the problem on Sunday by allowing voters to cast absentee ballots in person between 1:00 and 5:00 p.m. However, after just two hours, the Miami-Dade elections department shut down the location after too many people showed up. People outside the locked doors were reportedly screaming, "We want to vote!"
"They didn't have the infrastructure," filmmaker Lucas Leyva, who was among those turned away, told The Huffington Post's Janie Campbell. "We read the press release and everything that went out this morning, promising we'd be able to get absentee ballots and vote. We got here and there was a line of hundreds of people all being told the same thing, that that wasn't true anymore. You could drop off [a ballot], but they could not issue one."
And if getting turned away from the polls weren't enough of an indignity, some of those 180 people ended up getting their cars towed from the parking lot across the street, according to a Miami Herald reporter.
On Twitter, former Republican governor Charlie Crist -- who is now an independent -- responded to news of the office's closing, writing on Twitter, "Let the people vote!"
“We had the best of intentions to provide this service today,” said department spokeswoman Christina White. “We just can’t accommodate it to the degree that we would like to.”
About 30 minutes later, a Miami Herald reporter tweeted that the Miami-Dade location was reopening its doors.
Palm Beach, Pinellas, Orange, Leon and Hillsborough Counties also opened up in-person absentee voting on Sunday.
President Barack Obama's campaign and some of its supporters were attempting to keep people's spirits up -- and discourage them from abandoning the lines -- by bringing in food, water and even local musicians and DJs as entertainment.
North Miami Mayor Andre Pierre brought 400 slices of pizza to voters in line at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday night at the city's public library, according to an Obama official.
While many Democrats viewed it as a victory when a few offices opened absentee balloting on Sunday, the process is not the same as early voting -- and could result in more individuals not having their votes counted.
"Absentee ballots have a much higher rejection rate for minorities and young people, if you look at the Aug. 14 primary," said Smith.
A major reason there are so many problems at the polls is that last year, Florida's GOP-controlled legislature shortened the number of early voting days from 14 to eight, meaning all early voters are trying to cast their ballots in a shorter window. Previously, Floridians were allowed to vote on the Sunday before Election Day -- a day that typically had high traffic.
But losing that final Sunday isn't the only problem. Smith said that he and Dartmouth professor Michael Herron found that in 2008, voters 65 or older were much more likely to cast ballots in the first five days of early voting than members of other age groups, alleviating some of the pressure at the polls in the remaining days. Those extra days, however, are gone this year, leading to a compression that the system has been unable to handle.
Scott has refused to extend early voting hours, essentially arguing that there is no problem, despite calls from Democrats, independent groups and even a Republican elections supervisor. He is arguing that he can extend early voting hours only when there is a true emergency -- like a natural disaster -- that warrants it.
"I'm focused on making sure that we have fair, honest elections," said Scott. "One thing to know, these early voting days and on Election Day, if you're there by the time the polls close, you get to vote."
Scott has some of the lowest approval ratings of any governor in the nation. In recent Quinnipiac poll, just 39 percent of Floridians said they approved of the job he is doing. Scott, unlike many other GOP governors, has not hit the campaign trail much on behalf of Mitt Romney.
As Florida Democrats have pointed out, the state's previous two Republican governors-- Jeb Bush and Crist -- both extended the hours. A spokesman for Bush didn't return a request for comment.
A judge extended the hours in Orange County after the state Democratic Party suedfor more time. The location was closed for several hours on Saturday when everyone was evacuated due to a suspicious package.
Democrats are traditionally more likely to vote early, which is why many in the party have ascribed political motives to Scott's restriction of the process. According to areport in the Miami Herald on Saturday, Democrats were leading Republicans "by about 187,000 early in-person ballots cast" as of that morning.
On Election Day, there will be fewer polling precincts this year than in 2008 -- due to redistricting and budget constraints -- meaning traffic on Tuesday could also be a problem.
Florida is expected to be tight in this election. According to HuffPost Pollster's average of polls in the race, Romney is now leading Obama in the state by less than one percentage point.

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2012年10月30日星期二

Blue Island man's son survives Sandy



Jim Salapatek grew anxious as he waited for his phone to ring Monday morning.
His 28-year-old son, Drew, was among the 16 crew members on the HMS Bounty, a tall ship that sank off the coast of North Carolina as Cyclone Sandy blew ashore.
"I didn't know what phone call I was going to get," he said. "I had no idea if he was one of the missing crew members."
Salapatek, a Blue Island resident, said he was relieved when his son finally called to report that he had made it safely to land. He said Drew was in good health and would return home in a couple of days.
"He's doing fine," Salapatek said. "The crew is safe. They just need time to heal."
Drew was not available for comment Tuesday.
The Bounty's longtime captain, Robin Walbridge, remained missing Tuesday evening, and the body of deckhand Claudene Christian was found Monday evening, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard deployed ships and airplanes to search for the 63-year-old captain Tuesday, though 15-foot waves hampered their efforts.
"At this time we are optimistic that we will find the captain alive," said Petty Officer 1st Class Brandyn Hill.
The 180-foot-long replica 18th-century sailing vessel, built for the 1962 film version of "Mutiny on the Bounty," rolled over in 18-foot waves about 90 miles off the North Carolina coast.
Hill said two Coast Guard helicopters rescued the 14 surviving crew members around 6:30 a.m. Monday. Several hours later they found Christian, 42, unresponsive. She was later declared dead.
Salapatek said his son joined the crew of the Bounty two years ago after a series of humanitarian missions to Cuba and Haiti sparked his interest in sailing. He said the ship was Drew's home and the crew his second family.
"You get to be more than friends," he said. "They're putting their lives into their fellow crew members' hands. The bonds that develop in these people are phenomenal."
Despite the trauma Drew has endured, Salapatek expects his son will keep sailing.

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2012年10月29日星期一

New York City braces for wall of water

After days of seeming to take a looming superstorm in stride, New Yorkers gathered supplies or tried to get out of the way as forecasters warned that a wall of water could hit the nation's largest city.

Facing a seawater surge of anywhere from 6 to 11 feet from Hurricane Sandy, the city shut down its mass transit system, closed its schools and ordered hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes Sunday. Some New Yorkers packed grocery stores for water and food and scrambled to get out of flood zones, while others insisted they weren't going anywhere.

Clutching a white pillow in her left hand and two computers in another, Alyssa Marks rushed to get to the subway before it stopped running Sunday evening. She'd gotten cash but had no time to get toiletries and water.

"I'm nervous, but I'm also excited," she said as she left her apartment in a lower Manhattan evacuation zone for a friend's place on higher ground.

Ralph Gorham watched the sea get rough, but he planned to weather the storm at the Red Hook Lobster Pound, the seafood business he co-owns in a low-lying part of Brooklyn.

"I'm not leaving. My house is here. My business is here," he said. "When the bell tolls, you live with it."

Warnings about the superstorm - a predicted combination of Sandy, a wintry system moving in from the West and cold air streaming down from the Arctic - took on a much more ominous tone Sunday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's environmental protection chief, Louis Uccellini, called the projected storm surge "the worst-case scenario" for New York City, Long Island and northern New Jersey.

It threatened to swamp parts of lower Manhattan, flood subway tunnels and knock out the underground network of power, phone and high-speed Internet lines that are the lifeblood of America's financial capital.

The New York Stock Exchange and other U.S. financial markets are shutting down Monday as Hurricane Sandy bears down on the nation's largest city.

The NYSE's parent company said late Sunday that the shutdown might be extended through Tuesday "pending confirmation," according to exchange operator NYSE Euronext.

"If you don't evacuate, you're not just putting your own life in danger - you are also endangering the lives of our first responders who may have to come in and rescue you," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference Sunday as he announced a mandatory evacuation affecting 375,000 people in low-lying areas from the beaches of Queens to the glassy high-rises of Battery Park City. "This is a serious and dangerous storm."

Gov. Andrew Cuomo deployed National Guard troops to the city and Long Island. Consolidated Edison weighed the possibility of shutting down power in parts of lower Manhattan to protect equipment. Broadway shows were canceled for Sunday and Monday. One small hospital was being evacuated, while several others were moving patients to higher floors.

America's biggest public school system, which serves 1.1 million students, was ordered closed Monday, while many of the schools opened Sunday as emergency shelters.

It marked the second time in 14 months that New York City has faced a scenario forecasters have long feared: a big hurricane hitting the city or a bit south, such that the cyclone's counterclockwise winds drive water into miles of densely populated shoreline.

Hurricane Irene ultimately came ashore as a tropical storm in Coney Island, with a 4-foot storm surge that washed over parts of the southern tip of Manhattan but didn't wreak the havoc that officials had feared, although it caused tremendous damage elsewhere. Some experts have said that a surge 3 feet higher could have caused huge damage.

Bloomberg announced evacuations around 11:30 a.m., telling people to be out just 7.5 hours later. By 7 p.m., subways and buses were shut down, leaving more than 5 million mostly carless daily riders on their own to get to higher ground.

For those who refused to leave, they mayor had a message.

"They won't be arrested. But I would argue they are being very selfish," Bloomberg said, noting rescue crews will still try to help them if they are flooded. "We aren't going to leave them to die. We are going to save them."


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2012年10月23日星期二

Facebook's mobile surprise allays growth fears


(Reuters) - Facebook Inc grew mobile advertising revenue several times in the third quarter, a faster-than-expected pace that helped drive shares in the world's No. 1 social network nearly 13 percent higher.

Facebook said on Tuesday that it now gets 14 percent of its advertising revenue from mobile ads, helping to reassure investors that the social network is beginning to figure out how to earn money off smartphone and tablet users.
Mobile ad revenues totaled roughly $150 million, up from an estimated $40 million to $50 million in the second quarter and almost nothing in the first.
"This certainly dispels the most bearish view, that Facebook couldn't monetize people on phones or tablets," said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert Baird & Co.
"In about a six-month period they've actually started to generate decent revenues form their mobile applications," Sebastian added, though he said Facebook still needs to show that its mobile ads can command the same rates as its traditional ads and that they can deliver results for marketers.
Mobile advertising has been among the key investor concerns hanging over Facebook, helping slash more than $40 billion off its market value since its May IPO. As its users increasingly access the social network with their smartphones, Facebook has struggled to transition its business to mobile devices.
The mobile ads helped reignite Facebook's overall advertising business during the third quarter, following several consecutive quarters of slowing revenue growth that raised questions about Facebook's long-term prospects.
Advertising revenue increased 36 percent to $1.09 billion, up from 28 percent growth in the second quarter. But revenue from its payments and other businesses increased just 13 percent to $176 million.
Mark Zuckerberg, the 28-year-old chief executive who created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, said mobile was the "most misunderstood aspect" of the company and took issue with the "myth" that Facebook could not earn money on mobile.
"Over the long run we're going to see more monetization per time spent on mobile than on desktop," Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts on Tuesday.
The company's shares leapt nearly 13 percent to $21.97 in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Facebook said it had crossed the 1 billion threshold for monthly active users by September 30, of which 604 million were mobile users, a gain of 61 percent from a year earlier.
The shift to mobile has challenged many of the Web industry's top companies. Google Inc is the No.1 provider of smartphone software with its Android operating system. But the company missed Wall Street's revenue targets in the third quarter, with some analysts blaming the shortfall on its increasing reliance on lower-priced mobile ads.
Social game maker Zynga Inc, which announced layoffs of 5 percent of its staff on Tuesday, has suffered as it struggles to translate its hit games to mobile devices and as the use of its games on Facebook's service declines.
NOT PLEASED WITH GAMING
Zynga's woes were visible in Facebook's results, with Facebook's payments revenue from the maker of Farmville down 20 percent year on year.
Zuckerberg said he was not pleased with revenue from gaming, but said that beyond Zynga - which accounts for 7 percent of Facebook's total revenue - the situation was brighter.
"The interesting thing is that the rest of the games ecosystem has actually been growing. Our monthly payments revenue from the rest of the ecosystem increased 40 percent over the past year, since payments has been adopted," he said.
Zuckerberg also said Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Facebook acquired for roughly $750 million this year, now has 100 million users, up from 27 million when Facebook bought the company.
Facebook posted a net loss of $59 million or 2 cents a share in the three months ended September 30 after booking a big provision for income taxes. Excluding share-based compensation and income tax adjustments, it earned 12 cents a share, a penny higher than the average analyst expectation.
Facebook Finance Chief David Ebersman said the company would continue to invest aggressively during the fourth quarter, though the company did not provide a specific financial outlook, in keeping with its previous practice.
Ebersman said that the total number of ads that Facebook delivered in the third quarter increased 27 percent year-on-year and that the average price per ad increased 7 percent.
Facebook's third-quarter mobile revenue marked a big jump from the second quarter, when Facebook said that it was generating more than $1 million a day from a new class of ads that appear in users' newsfeeds. Facebook said that roughly half of that revenue was from mobile ads, suggesting that mobile advertising revenue totaled $45 million in the second quarter.
Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan said that Facebook's mobile ad revenue was impressive, but said that Facebook needs to proceed carefully so as not to damage the user experience by overloading its service with too many ads.
And he said that Facebook's desktop PC advertising business appeared to have shrunk by about $40 million from the second quarter. Rohan said he would rather see the desktop ad business remain stable as the mobile ad business grows.
Facebook's third-quarter revenue of $1.26 billion was a hair above the average analyst expectation of $1.23 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

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2012年10月22日星期一

HTC DLX phablet teased in photoshopped forgeries

You may be having a freak-out session right this minute over a set of “spy shots” released to the press via Android Central – if you’ll have a closer look, you’ll see some photoshop magic. These images show the HTC DLX with a 5-inch display, 4G LTE from Verizon, Beats Audio integrated, back-facing camera with single LED flash, and a rather thin/tall body overall. All of this photoshopped nonsense doesn’t disprove, on the other hand, that Verizon could be planning their next big DROID Incredible device.



The name HTC DLX is an extension of what we’ve seen in Japan with the HTC J Butterfly, a 5-inch smartphone with rather similar specifications to the one we’re seeing here. This USA version of the device takes the name DELUXE_J from the code-name given to the J Butterfly and turns it into DLX for Verizon. It’s not yet known whether Verizon will keep this name or extend their DROID dominance over their chosen ones here in the States. Expect a possibility of the name DROID Incredible X as well.

As far as how real/false these images are, you’ve only to compare them to the images of the HTC J Butterfly that has been offered up for hands-on experiences over in Japan already this past week. The ease in which one could forge these photos is too much to ignore. That lovely little rectangle near the main lens is also rather telling on the back of the handset. That said, again, we’ve heard enough about this phone to believe that these mock-ups are close enough anyway – thusly, let the rumors continue.



This device has been tipped to be working with a display that’s comparable in sharpness to the iPhone 5, has a 12 megapixel camera on the back (perhaps 8 megapixels for the USA, given the trends), and a 2 megapixel camera on the front. The processor inside is almost certainly going to be the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro as we’ve seen in the LG Optimus G, and 2GB or RAM has been displayed inside – just enough of a motor to play all your favorite racing games very, very wide.

HTC’s first Verizon phone in many moons here in the HTC DLX will be rolling out with 16GB of internal storage, almost certainly a microSD card slot for expansion up to 64GB extra (or 32, you never know), and you’ll have at least a 2500mAh battery inside – removable, of course. Inside you’ll have Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Sense 4+, and one whole heck of a lot of pixels up front.


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2012年10月17日星期三

Jon Jones, Chael Sonnen discuss UFC title fight


Chael Sonnen made no apologies Wednesday about gaining the next title shot against Ultimate Fighting Championship light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones.

“So what if I talked my way into it,” Sonnen said during a UFC conference call that included Jones and UFC President Dana White a day after the April 27 bout was announced.
“Welcome to life. … None of these guys” complaining “wanted to fight Jon Jones. Not one of these guys said, ‘I’ll fight Chael.’ And I have no problem taking a tune-up fight, and slapping any of those guys around. … I can talk. I talked a cat out of a tree today. Good for me. Chalk one more up for the bad guy.”
The quick-witted, occasionally sharp-tongued Sonnen, 35, was subjected to some ridicule by mixed martial arts fans and UFC fighters for landing the lucrative assignment of fighting Jones and participating as the opposing coach to Jones in the next version of the FX reality television series “The Ultimate Fighter,” which will begin filming later this month in Las Vegas.
Sonnen lost his last bout, a middleweight title shot against longtime champion Anderson Silva.
Temecula’s Dan Henderson, who was scheduled to fight Jones on Sept. 1 before suffering an injury, expressed frustration on his Twitter account that he was bypassed by Sonnen for Jones’ next fight.
“I guess I should just quit training to win fights and to be exciting for the fans, and just go to … talking school,” Henderson wrote.
Former light-heavyweight champion Lyoto Machida won an August bout at Staples Center that was supposed to make him Jones’ next opponent, but Machida balked at fighting Jones in September.
Likely sensing a ratings winner starring the UFC’s most skilled fighter against its most personable challenger, an FX executive announced on Wednesday’s call that the cable network will shift “The Ultimate Fighter” off Friday nights to another weekday evening when the series debuts in early January.
The 25-year-old Jones (17-1) successfully defended his light-heavyweight belt for the fourth time Sept. 22 with a fourth-round submission of veteran Vitor Belfort.
Jones’ right arm was badly twisted by a first-round armbar, however, and he said a recent visit to a Los Angeles physician revealed “tears” around the elbow that require a layoff from MMA training and physical therapy.
He said for that reason, and the fact he was irked by criticism he received for not accepting Sonnen as an opponent after Henderson’s injury -- the UFC then took the unprecedented act of scrapping its Sept. 1 card at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas -- a Sonnen fight made most sense.
“Beating Chael will help me to have closure of this whole situation,” Jones said. “I absolutely know I can beat Chael, with my skill-set, youth, my versatility. I’m a championship fighter and Chael is not.”
Sonnen and Jones gave a glimpse of the banter that will continue through “The Ultimate Fighter” on the call.
Sonnen (28-12-1) said while Jones is “the best fighter I’ve ever seen,” he hasn’t defeated a worthy challenger, even though Jones’ victories have come against former champions Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, Machida, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Rashad Evans.
“He hasn’t beat anybody until he beats me,” said Sonnen, whose greatest performance in the octagon was his near upset of Silva in 2010. “I’m the man. And I’m the man because I say I’m the man.”
Answered Jones: “This has nothing to do with the belt. Chael’s not getting close to the belt. It’s about putting him into irrelevance.
“Chael’s an interesting guy. I respect how he gets what he wants, all except championships. He’s a good talker, good for the sport. Extremely disrespectful. But I’ll be doing Chael and a lot of people a favor, showing he has a gift for gab, but not athletic talent.”

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Kobe Bryant helps out Alex Rodriguez

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Kobe Bryant was busy scoring 31 points in 29 minutes of the Los Angeles Lakers' 114-80 exhibition loss to the Utah Jazz on Tuesday night at the Honda Center.

The New York Yankees' 2-1 loss to the Detroit Tigers in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series was a world away. But the struggles of his friend Alex Rodriguez were not.

"We spoke a couple of days ago," Bryant said of Rodriguez, whom he befriended on the set of a commercial a few years ago. "You can only control what you can control. You go out there and do the best job you can. If they take you out of the lineup, it's really on you to be a good teammate and support the other guys, which he's good about doing."
But that's not exactly what Bryant said when he called Rodriguez, who was benched for Game 3 on Tuesday night because he's hit .143 in the ALCS and .130 in the playoffs with no RBIs.
No, that conversation went more like this:
"I just say to him, 'You're Alex Rodriguez. You're A-Rod. You're one of the best to ever do it,'" Bryant said. "I think sometimes he kind of forgets that and wants to try to do the right thing all the time. Which is the right team attitude to have. But other times you really have to put your head down and say, 'Hell with it' and just do your thing.
"Hopefully the next game they'll kind of give him a chance, maybe put him back at third and let him respond to the pressure, which I think he'll do."
Although both are among the best to ever play their respective sports, Bryant and Rodriguez would seem to be very dissimilar.
"We're different," Bryant said. "But you're talking about, 'He's one of the best to ever play.' I think really the difference is, sometimes he forgets he's the best. ... Where, I don't."
Bryant laughed at the self-deprecating comment, then continued on to explain how the two men are in some ways the same.
"We know what it takes to get to that level," he said. "The consistency, the sacrifice, the work ethic, the constant scrutiny, that's something we all have in common -- from golf to cycling to swimming to basketball to baseball."


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