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The Committee on Liberatory Information Technology has announced a long-standing Chromebook bug that could reveal user location history. Evidently already on the radar of Google, the platform has a feature allowing anyone with physical access to your device to connect as a guest and view your Wi-Fi logs. Of course, once said intruder has accessed these logs, they would then need the technical knowhow to make sense of them. However, if they are skilled enough, they may be able to track your place history by viewing your Wi-Fi network access over the past seven days. It turns out the bug...

Ray Blanco, The Daily Reckoning June 29, 2015Do you like your iPhone? Today, you are walking with the equivalent of what was supercomputer not too long ago — in your pocket. The foundation for the modern semiconductor industry got its start in the late 1940s and 1950s. Electronics up until then were dependent on vacuum tubes. These weren’t, to say the least, very easy to miniaturize. But we did try to use them. In 1946, the U.S. government built the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) and contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, along...

Historic Integrated Circuit Expected To Fetch Up To $2M At Auction An integrated circuit that Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby used in 1958 to demonstrate his invention of the new technology is expected to sell for up to $2 million at auction. (snip)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Texas Instruments Inc plans to cut 1,100 jobs in the United States, Japan and India, or about 3 percent of its global workforce, in a corporate restructuring to save $130 million by the end of 2014. The U.S. chipmaker, which in 2012 announced it would lay off 1,700 people as it wound down its mobile processor business, said on Tuesday it wanted to reduce expenses in its embedded-processing division and in Japan. "Technology markets mature from time to time and you have to rebalance where you spend your money," Chief Financial Officer Kevin March said in...

Texas Instruments just put a chip through the heart of Intel’s Thunderbolt folly with their new HD3SS2521 DockPort controller. This little $1.85 chip both vastly simplifies the user experience and shines a harsh light on what Intel can’t do with a closed and 75x more expensive solution. If you haven’t been paying attention, DockPort is the sane and open answer to Intel’s still broken and anti-user Light Peak/Thunderbolt interface. Formerly called Lightning Bolt, DockPort was AMD’s answer to the non-solution that Intel tried to spin Thunderbolt as. Several years in Thunderbolt is achieving some of the features promised at release...

Amazon, the world's largest online store, is reportedly negotiating to acquire Texas Instruments, a leading designer of custom chips for mobile and embedded markets. The move will help Amazon to better compete on the market of media tablets and possibly expand its hardware offerings in general.Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist reported on Monday that Amazon is in advanced talks to buy Texas Instruments, the company that supplies OMAP system-on-chips for Kindle Fire media tablets. The report said any deal for the smartphone chip business of Texas Instruments Inc (TI) would probably be worth billions of dollars and could make Amazon...

Texas Instruments TI-85 says: 48÷2(9+3) = 2 But Texas Instruments TI-86 says: 48÷2(9+3) = 288

Heating up clock wars Whether you like it or not, the ARM revolution is happening today and these small chips are starting to matter to the world just as much as Intel and AMD chips do. They will get to many tablets and mobile phones in 2011 and onward and most of the 2011 models are dual-core. We just mentioned the 1.5GHz OMAP 4440 chip yesterday and we got confirmation from a source close to Texas Instruments that this fancy fast chip can ship in the second half of 2011. Texas (non-chainsaw) chaps do believe that that have a good...

Big GHz fight in 2011 Qualcomm has decided to show its dual Scorpion based MSM8x60 mobile CPU and it also told the world that this CPU can hit 1.2GHz, per core that is. The chip has an Adreno 220 GPU that we know little about and of course its a 45nm chip since 28nm should be only ready in the latter part of 2011. The chip should be able to do high definition stereoscopic 3D video, and multi-party video conferencing as well as some nice gaming. It is intended for tablets and phones and you can bet that you will...

Texas Instruments is buying back $7.5 billion in common stock to boost shareholder value.

DALLAS, June 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Jack St. Clair Kilby, retired TI engineer and inventor of the integrated circuit, died yesterday in Dallas following a brief battle with cancer. He was 81. Mr. Kilby invented the first monolithic integrated circuit, which laid the foundation for the field of modern microelectronics, moving the industry into a world of miniaturization and integration that continues today. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his role in the invention of the integrated circuit. "In my opinion, there are only a handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world and...

RICHMOND -- Texas Instruments is replacing 160,000 school calculators in Virginia after an observant sixth-grader discovered a function that would have given students an unfair advantage on standardized tests. The state's education department asked Texas Instruments two years ago to disable the function that converts decimals to fractions because students are required to know how to do that with paper and pencil on statewide tests. But in January, Dakota Brown, 12, a student at Carver Middle School in Chesterfield County, figured out that by pressing two other keys on his approved TI-30 Xa SE VA, he could change decimals into...

DALLAS (AP) - Cecil Howard Green, the last living member of the four founders of Texas Instruments, died Saturday, the company announced. He was 102. Green had recently contracted pneumonia and died in La Jolla, Calif. "Cecil's leadership helped shape the very foundation of Texas Instruments - respect for people, ethics in business, and the strong belief that we need to give back to our community," said Tom Engibous, chairman, president and CEO of Texas Instruments. In December 1941, Green joined Eugene McDermott, J. Erik Jonsson and H. Bates Peacock to buy Dallas-based Geophysical Service Inc., the predecessor to Texas...