Sony buying back Cell chip fabrication facilities from Toshiba, it's official

It's official. Sony and Toshiba just issued a press release saying that the two companies have signed a binding memorandum of understanding to transfer Tosh's fabrication facilities, operated by Nagasaki Semiconductor Manufacturing, back to Sony. A deal that is rumored to cost Sony some 50 billion yen (about $835 million) -- a bargain considering that Sony sold the facilities that manufacture the Cell Broadband Engine, RSX graphics engine, and other SoCs to Toshiba for 90 billion Yen back in 2008. Unfortunately, Sony's being coy about its plans for the new facilities. The two hope to complete the transfer sometime in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012.

Continue reading Sony buying back Cell chip fabrication facilities from Toshiba, it's official

Sony buying back Cell chip fabrication facilities from Toshiba, it's official originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Dec 2010 01:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceSony  | Email this | Comments


Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Id39_iBaC6A/

NINTENDO AUTODESK Alicia Witt BHARTI AIRTEL Brody Dalle

Daily Crunch: A Series of Sneaks Edition

Review: Onaroo Personal Baby Assistant Help Identify A Guy Who Stole Game Consoles From A Children?s Cancer Ward Physical Avatars For MP3s May Be The Vinyl Of The Future Video: Constructing A Working NES Coffee Table Latest Kinect Hack Takes Your Air Guitar Fantasy To A Whole New Level

Source: http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/12/11/daily-crunch-series-of-sneaks/

Amanda Marcum AMKOR TECHNOLOGY Beyoncé Charlize Theron ORACLE

WITN: The Dumbest and Smartest People of 2010, Plus Our Predictions for 2011 (TCTV)

With apologies to Car Talk, you've squandered a perfectly good half-of-a-year watching "Why Is This News?" and we decided to reward you with a show that actually contains business analysis, rather than a rant about hotels or the hijinks of Michael Arrington. In this week's episode Paul and Sarah give their picks for the dumbest and smartest people of 2010, a slam-dunk prediction for 2011 and a Hail Mary prediction for 2011. We know you'll remind us of the ones we forgot in the comments. The downside of doing a year-end episode is it's filmed without the help of TCTV's crack editing team. Forgive a few rough transitions, but we wanted to keep this episode short....well, short for us. We know you people have family to hug, Holiday dinners to eat and presents to unwrap.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/w0T3BrqM5P4/

Alicia Keys AMAZONCOM Asia Argento ADOBE SYSTEMS Brooke Burke

Usher's 'OMG' Is MTV News' #1 Song Of 2010!

Club smash, featuring will.i.am, tops our list of the Top 25 Songs of the year.
By James Montgomery


Usher
Photo: Getty Images

MTV News' Top 25 Songs of 2010 has reached an end. We've already counted down the rest, and now it's time to get to the best: Usher's "OMG," the song that perfectly sums up the past 12 months of popular music — and makes you wanna move until you can't move no more.

If 2010 proved anything, it's that a DJ really can save your life ... or at least get you to #1 on the Hot 100. After years of staring at each other from across the room, hip-hop, pop and R&B all decided to finally get in bed with dance music, and the results weren't always pretty, but they were certainly successful. To date, only 17 songs have made it to the top spot of Billboard's singles chart in 2010, and nearly two-thirds of them — from Ke$ha's "Tik Tok" to Far East Movement's "Like a G6" — were, in some way, dance songs.

In that regard, no song better sums up 2010 pop music quite like Usher's "OMG," the dance song to end all dance songs. Sure, it may not have matched the swagger of Kanye West's "Power," the snarl of Rick Ross' "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)" or the inbox-clogging spread of Cee Lo's "F--- You," but it didn't have to. None of those songs went to #1, after all. "OMG" did. Twice.

Even among songs that managed to snag that top spot — Eminem and Rihanna's "Love the Way You Lie," Katy Perry's "California Gurls," B.o.B and Bruno Mars' "Nothin' on You" — "OMG" stood out from the pack, mostly because of its pedigree. It's not a stretch to say that any of those tracks could've (and probably would've) been #1 in any other year; "OMG" could only have done it in 2010, because it was crafted to do nothing else. No other song this year was as of the moment, as singular and shiny and downright undeniable. There's a reason it was named on more ballots than any other song on our countdown and justly takes the title of MTV News' #1 Song of 2010.

And while all that is important, it's largely beside the point. "OMG" is the kind of song that truly defies deep inspection, because it's not exactly headphone music. Rather, it was made for the clubs, designed to envelop you on the dance floor and not let go until the final "oh-ohh-oh-ooh-oh." And in that regard, it succeeds in spades. It is a masterful melding of R&B, and Euro dance, all icy synths and handclaps, starbursts and stutters and sing-along chants. It ebbs and flows, stops and starts, pumps and preens. Simply put, you cannot listen to it without moving in some way. (MTV's Dee Caligiuri, who voted on our countdown, probably put it best one night when she declared: "There are so many dances you can do to it!") And if that's not the definition of a success, well, then I don't know what is.

A large portion of the credit for "OMG" has to go to will.i.am, who not only produced the track (I know!), but was smart enough to see this whole dance thing coming when he teamed up with producer David Guetta last year. Those songs — "Boom Boom Pow" and "I Gotta Feeling" — were, of course, massive, but neither of them are as good as this. Given full control, Will goes off the deep end, cramming the song with every dance trick in the book — and probably some new ones he just invented on the spot. And Usher, whose career, truth be told, was sort of in need of a shot in the arm, is the beneficiary. He floats and gloats above the mix, suave and cocksure, knowing that he is exactly the right man at the right time. That time, of course, had to be 2010.

Because in a year when so many big-name acts embraced the DJ, he flat-out did it better than any of them. "OMG" represents the peak of the dance-pop era in which we live, a song as undeniable as it is of the moment. We can only speculate as to what next year will bring, but there's really no denying that, as 2010 comes to a close, Usher stands above all else, reinvigorated and ready for more. It's enough to make you say "Oh My God," really.

How does Usher's "OMG" rank among the year's best songs? Let us know in the comments!

MTV News' Top 25 Songs of 2010 have all been counted down. But the fun isn't over yet: We still want to see your picks in the comments below!

Related Videos Related Photos Related Artists

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1653969/20101209/usher.jhtml

Christina Milian CYPRESS SEMICONDUCTOR Adriana Lima Ashley Olsen Ashlee Simpson

White Jigsaw is a very minimalistic puzzle -- Time Waster

whitejigsaw

I used to think the whole point of putting together a jigsaw puzzle was the satisfaction of seeing the image at the end. You know, they always sell those huge puzzles that take up half a wall once you're done making them - it's like creating a poster, one step at a time.

White Jigsaw proves that it's not all about the picture. It's as bare-bones as can be: just a bunch of puzzle pieces, and a frame they all have to fit into. No sound effects, no images, nothing but the zen-like essence of the jigsaw.

The game starts you off with a basic 4x3 puzzle, and gradually increases in complexity as you progress (the next level is 5x3). The pieces snap into position as you drag them, and they all seem to be aligned correctly, so no rotation is needed. This really helps - I think if they could be rotated it would get a lot more confusing, especially since they're blank so you can't match pieces of the image to figure out the orientation.

While the game doesn't save your progress on a single level, it does let you carry on from the last level you reached before you stopped playing. All in all, it's a great way to rekindle your love for jigsaw puzzles.

White Jigsaw is a very minimalistic puzzle -- Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/14/white-jigsaw-is-a-very-minimalistic-puzzle-time-wasters/

COMPAL ELECTRONICS Christina Applegate Anna Friel RESEARCH IN MOTION Ali Larter

Hedge fund using Twitter to predict stock prices, OK Cupid to meet girls

For some reason, we weren't surprised when Derwent Capital Markets announced plans to launch a hedge fund in February that will trade based on something called "Twitter sentiment," among other things. The science behind it comes from researchers at the University of Manchester and Indiana University, which maintains that there is a correlation between public mood and the Dow Jones industrial average. Apparently, a calm public seems to indicate that the Dow will go up, while an anxious public indicates that the Dow will go down. And according to Johan Bollen, an associate professor of informatics and computing at IU, Twitter posts can be analyzed and used to judge the public mood -- with a greater than 87 percent accuracy. Hit the source link to see him state his case.

Hedge fund using Twitter to predict stock prices, OK Cupid to meet girls originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Dec 2010 20:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Business Insider  |  sourceBloomberg  | Email this | Comments


Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/csyCaglb5RM/

AnnaLynne McCord Alessandra Ambrosio Amber Arbucci ALLIANCE DATA SYSTEMS Amanda Righetti

Google Books now lets you compare word and phrase frequency in 5.2 million books

Google, in association with a couple of boffins from Harvard University, has just released an awesome tool that should entertain you for at least 10 minutes, and possibly more. It lets you compare words, or phrases, from a corpus totaling 500 billion words from 5.2 million books -- in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish.

The potential applications for such a tool are surprisingly large; written works make up the entirety of recorded history, after all. That history might not be entirely accurate, but analysis can still yield some fantastic info. The Google Blog offers a couple of interesting graphs -- Virus vs. Bacteria, which chronicles the massive improvements in science and medicine; and Tofu vs. Hot Dog shows both the growing popularity of vegetarianism, and America's love of cow -- but it's very easy to make your own, telling graphs.

Analog vs. Digital, for example, or America vs. England (compare American English to British English). If you find any interesting combos, leave a comment!

Google Books now lets you compare word and phrase frequency in 5.2 million books originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/12/17/google-books-now-lets-you-compare-word-and-phrase-frequency-in-5/

Alexis Bledel Anna Paquin Christina Aguilera SHAW COMMUNICATIONS Carla Gugino

Cyberattacks Cripple Rights Groups as Culture Wars Move Online

Human rights groups are increasingly getting shut down by distributed denial of service and other cyberattacks, according to a report from Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The center reported that 280 independent media and human rights websites were hit by 140 attacks between September 2009 and August 2010.

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/71520.html

Amber Valletta Bar Refaeli ANIXTER INTERNATIONAL Amanda Peet America Ferrera