Over-the-Air TV Catches Second Wind, Aided by Web

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There are signs that consumers are responding. TV-antenna seller Richard Schneider of St. Louis says sales at his company are soaring. Mr. Schneider’s Antennas Direct sold 70,000 antennas in January, and he expects to double last year’s sales of about 600,000. That was up from 400,000 antennas in 2010.

via Over-the-Air TV Catches Second Wind, Aided by Web – WSJ.com.

“It’s not a stretch to think that the broadcast business model will outlive that of cable,” said National Association of Broadcasters spokesman Dennis Wharton. “The naysayers can talk all they want about broadcasting being a dinosaur.”

Square Payment Pace Rises 25% in Niche Coveted by EBay

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Square Inc., maker of credit-card readers for smartphones and tablets, has increased its payment volume 25 percent since March, when EBay Inc. EBAY’s PayPal showed off a new mobile scanner and underscored growth in the field.

Square, founded in 2009, is processing transactions at an annualized rate of $5 billion, up from $4 billion a month ago, as more consumers embrace mobile payments, Chief Operating Officer Keith Rabois said in an interview. The San Francisco company is making cash from sales before 5 p.m. on any day available in merchants’ accounts on the next business day, compared with as many as five days out for other processors.

via Square Payment Pace Rises 25% in Niche Coveted by EBay – Bloomberg.

Coolest jobs in tech (literally): running a South Pole data center

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That mission demands a level of reliability that many less remote data centers cannot provide. Raytheon Polar Services held the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic programs support contract until April. As Dennis Gitt, a former director of IT and communications services for the company puts it, a failure anywhere in the Antarctic systems could lose data from events in space that may not be seen again for millennia.

via Coolest jobs in tech (literally): running a South Pole data center.

With a maximum population of 150 at the base during the Austral summer, South Pole IT professionals-in-residence are limited to a select few. And they don’t get to stay long—most of the WIPAC IT team only stays for a few months in the summer, during which they have to complete all planned IT infrastructure projects.

Intel Core i7-3770K Review: A Small Step Up For Ivy Bridge : Ivy Bridge: Was It Worth The Wait?

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Intel built Sandy Bridge-based chips in three different configurations: one quad-core and two dual-core designs. The most complex implementation included 995 million transistors in a 216 mm² piece of silicon. In comparison, the biggest Ivy Bridge die incorporates 1.4 billion transistors on a 160 mm² die.

via Intel Core i7-3770K Review: A Small Step Up For Ivy Bridge : Ivy Bridge: Was It Worth The Wait?.

All told, Ivy Bridge is yet another highly integrated processor design from Intel. Its pieces were constructed by independent teams throughout the world—engineers in Israel are responsible for the IA cores, a team in Folsom, CA built the graphics engine, and a second team in Folsom implemented the interconnects, cache, and system agent. Of course, a process development group up in Oregon made sure it’d all come together on the new 22 nm node.

Share your stuff with a link!

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We’re super excited to announce a whole new way to share: now you can send a link to the files or folders in your Dropbox!

Sharing with friends and family is easy! Once you’ve saved that video of your niece’s birthday party to Dropbox, just make a link to send to grandma and she can simply watch online — no download required! This saves you the hassle of having to re-upload or attach it to an email.

via The Dropbox Blog » Blog Archive » Share your stuff with a link!.

MIT Completes the “Holy Grail of Hacks,” Turning the Green Building into a Game of Tetris

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Home of the Institute’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science, the Green Building lends itself as an ideal grid for the game. According to the IHTFP Hack Gallery, “MIT hackers have long considered ‘Tetris on the Green Building’ to be the Holy Grail of hacks.”

via MIT Completes the “Holy Grail of Hacks,” Turning the Green Building into a Game of Tetris [Slideshow + Video] | BostInno.

The Artificial Life of the App Store – the Best Strategy to Succeed

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First they proposed five types of developer, and you won’t find it hard to recognize them:

  • S0 – the innovator always builds apps with a wide range of novel features.S1- the milker who implements slight largely unnecessary variations on a single app.
  • S2 – the optimizer who simply releases improvements on their most successful app.
  • S3 – the copycat simply copies the best apps in the market.
  • S – the flexible developer who adopts whichever strategies seems good at the moment.

via The Artificial Life of the App Store – the Best Strategy to Succeed.