With the spark of uncertainty in various global markets after the events of the new year, not even the giants are able to get by unscathed. Toshiba’s board on Friday approved plans to make its core memory chip business a separate company for outside investment. With it goes more than just ownership, but private equity and investments in the specific sectors being split off.
Toshiba’s memory chip business is the world’s biggest NAND flash memory producer after Samsung, and it accounts for the bulk of Toshiba’s operating profits. The sale, however, is looking to sell roughly 20 percent of its holdings for over 200 billion yen. Aiming to complete the sale by the end of the financial year, Toshiba will announce the final figure for the writedown on February 14th when it reports third-quarter results.
With bootable USB media becoming more and more common and fewer machines even shipping with a CD drive, ISO image files and other forms of portable software is becoming the new standard for software distributions. To supplement this shift, Rufus aims to convert any ISO image into a boot drive in a matter of minutes.
Rufus is an easy to use portable software for Windows devices to create bootable USB drives using ISO images. This includes options to properly identify images such as installation disks or operating systems and then it will compare the image to the available disk size. The process itself does not take a particularly long time but it does depend on the size of the ISo and speed of the USB drive.
Rasberry Pi’s Pixel is a lightweight operating system released by the foundation behind the affordable $35 Rasberry Pi computer and it is now available for PC or Mac users who want to renew their old hardware! The Linux-based OS comes as a downloadable image you can either burn to a DVD or load onto a USB drive to boot directly into the Pixel environment.
What does this mean for your old laptop that has been lying around? It means you can once again use it for basic tasks and web browsing via Chromium, which comes pre-installed. This is, however, a prototype build. Some bugs and hardware compatibility issues are expected, one of which is a recognition error with modern Mac systems but altogether, nothing that would be harmful to your system. The creative prioritization was for the purpose of distributing this Mac and PC version because it was believed to be most useful in schools with outdated hardware. With Pixel, these machines will once again be able to access information in modern fashion.
For anyone looking for a PC mic, a USB connection is a must. Mic jack connections with the standard 3.5mm cable don’t have the connections or data flow to properly translate sound into usable data for a computer. To go beyond this, however, would be to use tools like Behringer’s new MIC500USB to achieve that famous tube “warmth” without having to record in a studio with rackmounted tube preamps.
In light of misinformation and explosively popular falsehoods we’ve seen in the last few years, Facebook has taken steps to create consequences for spreading objectionable content. This month the US Trademark and Patent Office published Facebook’s application for a detection tool on their platform. As stated in the application, its primary purpose is to improve detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying. Last month, however, Zuckerberg emphasized the need for “better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.”
The system described is largely consistent with Facebook’s current protocols for objectionable content but it also adds layers of machine learning to improve efficiency. The move comes at a time when Facebook is under increasing public pressure to reduce the spread of propaganda through its network. Although they have expressed commitment to making improvements, they are proceeding with caution to the idea that machine learning can separate fact from fiction but due to the audiences receptive to some of the more questionable content, clear standards may be the first necessary step for implementation.
Phishing emails and information theft as a whole can be frightening as well as annoying. They flood our inboxes hoping our guard is down and we make a mistake to give up our private details and it seems like a never ending battle against hackers and scammers. To combat this, here are a few easy steps that can keep your information secure.
