Stephen Shankland joins the show to talk about the HTC One M8 and the new CEO of Mozilla. Can Firefox rule mobile?
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Show Notes
Today’s guest: Stephen Shankland, senior writer, CNET News
Headlines
HTC announced the new HTC One today AKA the M8, in Gunmetal Greay, Glacial Silver or ugly, I mean Amber Gold. Many gadget reviewers have admitted to crushes on the all-metal design. Among the features are two rear-facing cameras to allow changing focus on photos after they’re taken. You can also answer a call just by picking up the device and holding it to your head. The Android 4.4 KitKat phone runs HTC’s Sense 6 on a Snapdragon 801 processor, with 2 GB of RAM with either 16 or 32 GB of onboard storage. The 2600 mAh battery should be good for up to 20 hours of 3G talk time, though the phone is LTE. A $50 Dot View case from HTC allows you to see notifications like 8Bit graphics through the cases cover. AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Rogers, Bell and Telus in North America have it for pre-order now, it’s coming to more North American outlets in early April and Australia, UK, Taiwan and France by the end of the month. Price runs $649 unlocked, $699 for the Google Play edition without Sense and from $199 to $249 with a contract.
The New York Times reports US President Barack Obama will propose bills to the US Congress to eliminate the NSA’s in-house phone call data storage and create a new surveillance court to handle phone data requests. The new court would review requests for phone data directly from the phone companies, that go no more than two hops from a phone number of interests. The bill would not address overseas surveillance programs.
Google made waves in enterprise cloud service announcing a 32 percent across the board price cut. SVP Urs Hölzle told attendees at Google Cloud Platform Live that the company will also offer sustained-use discounts without pre-payment. Amazon is holding its own cloud event tomorrow so expect Amazon Reserved Instances to possibly get a price adjustment themselves.
MacStories reports developer Olga Osadcha noted Apple is testing a related search suggestion feature for its App Store which started rolling out today for iPhone users on iOS7. The suggestions show up as a scrollable menu bar with similar or related searches.
ExtremeTech reports Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang made a handful of announcements at the GPU Technology Conference. Nvidia and IBM have partnered up on NVLink which connects GPUs and CPUs at a claimed 12-15x over the current implemntation of PCI-Express. Nvidia also talked up the successor to Maxwell, code-named Pascal coming with new features in 2016. And Nvidia announced a dual-GPU Titan card called Titan Z with up to 8TFLOPS of theoretical FLOPS performance. The dual GK110 card will run companies $3,000.
News From You
beatmaster80 submitted the Business Insider story on the IRS decision to classify Bitcoins as property not currency. That means every time you spend BitCoins you have to report it the way you would selling something like stock or a house. Put another way, buy something with bitcoins, pay capital gains tax. The good news is the US Treasury Department should now begin developing formal regulations, so this guidance may not be the final word.
ancientbearwizard submitted the Ars Technica story on Microsoft donating the source code for MS_DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The museum also holds source code for Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Apple II DOS. The source is now freely downloadable by anyone.
KAPT_Kipper gave us the TechCrunch story on Google signing up Italian company Luxottica to design and build Google Glass. Luxottica makes the Ray-Ban, Oakley, Miu Miu, Armani, and other brands of eyewear. Google cited Luxottica’s experience selling eyewear to the public as a key factor in the deal. This can easily be read as a sign Google’s getting closer to making a Google Glass product available to the general public.
cincyhuffster sent in the Engadget story about new lighter weight airbags for mortorcycles. The Ducati Multistrada D-Air has sensors attached to the bike’s electronic system that monitor the vehicle’s acceleration, breaking and orientation. In the event of a crash, it can send a signal over WiFi to your jacket, so that the internal airbags will deploy before you hit the ground. The produce is scheduled to launch in Europe in May.
Discussion Section Links: HTC One M8
http://www.cnet.com/news/htc-one-m8-to-arrive-in-google-play-edition/
http://www.cnet.com/news/htc-announces-htc-one-m8/
http://www.cnet.com/products/htc-one-m8/
http://www.cnet.com/news/the-inside-story-of-the-htc-one-m8/
http://androidcommunity.com/htc-one-m8-dot-view-case-hands-on-20140325/
http://www.cnet.com/news/brendan-eich-mo zillas-alpha-nerd-takes-over-as-ceo-q-a/
I came across this great piece of software for encrypting your documents in cloud storage accounts called Boxcryptor
They have a free and paid for accounts that allow you to…….wait for it…..encrypt your files…..
You can use it with OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive etc…. It uses AES-256 bit encryption, you can use it on Mac or PC. It’s just a great way to keep you stuff secure. I found this program looking for something to put on added security with my tax returns in the cloud.
As always a huge fan of all your podcasts and keep it up!
Chris Denny
Wednesday’s Guest: Andy Ihnatko, technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times