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OCAU News |
The Xbox 360 has got a US$50 price cut effective from tomorrow in the US. After more than 18 months of presence on the market, Microsoft’s next-gen gaming rig is getting a $50 price cut, confirming rumors that the Redmond giant is not only losing a lot of money with the console, but is also in danger of losing its supremacy in favor of Nintendo. Although the price cut will affect only the US territory and is only half the size of the one operated by Sony for its PS3, it is still significant and shows that tough competition from Nintendo.
In continuation with the shuttle news, apparently only 40% of them launch on time. Next time you grumble about your late airline flight, consider the space shuttle: It launches on time 40 percent of the time. Not so great when stacked against the airline industry, which had a 73 percent on-time arrival record for the first six months of this year. But let's be fair. The shuttle is the world's most complicated aeronautical machine, so 40 percent may not be so bad.
The flash memory market got a bit of a shake up after a power outage at Samsung disrupted production. On Friday, a power cut at a Samsung Electronics plant near Seoul forced the South Korean memory giant to shut down six of its chip production lines. The outage sparked expectations of decreases in memory supply and higher prices. A Samsung spokeswoman explained to Reuters that a problem in the afternoon at the switchboard at a transformer substation led to a power shortage. The company’s advanced NAND flash memory lines was one of the lines affected by power issue.
Lenovo are set to follow Dell with Linux based laptops. Lenovo Group, the No. 3 personal computer maker, says it will introduce a broad line of Linux laptops, the strongest endorsement to date of the open-source software by a major PC maker. The Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft's market-dominating Windows, has been one of the fastest-growing types of software used on servers and other types of powerful business computers over the past decade.
The US$1.5 billion fine to Microsoft over MP3 patents has been overturned by a US judge. A US district court has overturned a decision ordering Microsoft to pay phone firm Alcatel-Lucent $1.52bn (£777m) for infringing music patents. The federal judge in San Diego reversed a jury's decision which had ruled that Microsoft's Media Player software infringed on two Alcatel patents. Both patents regarded how audio was converted into MP3 files. Alcatel said it would appeal against the decision while Microsoft said the reversal was a "victory for consumers".
And finally, Damn Interesting have posted an article about a giant underground lake in Antarctica discovered by the Russians. In the early 1990s, a Russian drilling rig encountered something peculiar two miles beneath the coldest and most desolate place on Earth. For decades, the workers at Vostok Research Station in Antarctica had been extracting core samples from deep scientific boreholes, and analyzing the lasagna-like layers of ice to study Earth's bygone climate. But after tunneling through 414,000 layers or so– about two miles into the icecap– the layers abruptly ended.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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