Free Republic

Unlike Spotify, the new incarnation of the streaming music service under Apple won't have a way to listen to anything on demand for free, according to a report. The new Beats Music may look different from the old Beats Music, but it will feel just the same to your wallet. The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported Monday that Apple's subscription streaming service will have the standard $10-a-month price to listen to any song on demand. Other outlets had reported previously that Apple was negotiating with labels to have a lower price but failed to win that concession. The...

Prior to the Apple Watch’s launch, many were already predicting that the device would be the answer to wearables and be the device that would change the landscape of the wearables industry. Initial reviews are a bit mixed but it is Apple’s first-gen smartwatch so there are bound to be some areas that could be improved upon. However if the figures provided by analysts are accurate, it seems that there are many who are interested in the device regardless of the reviews. According to the latest numbers from Global Equities Research, they have estimated that Apple has received 7 million...

Since the devices first went on sale in April, Apple (AAPL, Tech30) has received 7 million orders in total and shipped 2.5 million watches so far, according to a Global Equities Research report, citing tracking methods used by app developers. Apple is expected to deliver about 5 million Apple Watches by the end of the quarter, which is two times more than analysts expected, Trip Chowdhry, Managing Director of Global Equities Research, told CNNMoney. This would beat the company's previous "new category" debuts -- the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. When the iPod first went on sale in 2001, Apple sold...

Amazon is testing robots that could one day replace human workers in warehouses. Amazon's Picking Challenge was a competition designed to select which robot could best perform duties normally carried out by human workers within warehouses. Warehouse robots were tested at the IEEE's International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Seattle. They were made to select a paperback book, a bag of Oreo cookies, dog toys and a rubber duck from a shelf much like those typically seen in warehouses. Points were awarded for proper grasping and packing and deducted whenever a robot dropped, lost or broke an item....

Google’s self-driving cars will hit the roads by summer 2015 On May 21, 2015, Nvidia (NVDA) started shipping Drive PX, its hardware and software development kit, to leading luxury car manufacturers including Bentley, Aston Martin, Tesla (TSLA), and Rolls-Royce. Google (GOOG), which has been in this space for the last six years, will be putting its self-driving cars on public roads by as early as summer 2015. Tech giants report that Google, with a fleet of almost 20 self-driving cars, now averages ~10,000 self-driving miles per week. Google claims that its cars have 75 years of US adult driving experience...

Microsoft has a grand plan to get its next operating system, Windows 10, running on 1 billion devices in three years -- by giving it away for free. Well, sort of. The software, which Microsoft announced Monday will begin rolling out July 29, is a free upgrade for all Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PC and tablet users. For computers, those two versions power 74.1 percent of all PCs, according to NetMarketShare. For everyone else, it's the same pricing as Windows 8, the company confirmed to CNET on Monday. A copy of Windows 10 Home will run $119, while Windows...

The world's largest chip maker just made its largest acquisition ever. Intel is buying programmable chip maker Altera Corporation in a $16.7 billion cash deal with stockholders taking home $54 per share. The merger comes amidst a lag in the personal-computer market, one that Intel's been able to stay above. Intel's first-quarter earnings report in April showed a 3 percent rise in income compared to the same quarter last year. And Intel likely wants to continue keeping its head above water. That's where Altera should help out. A joint press release said Intel's products and manufacturing process will join with...

Microsoft's next generation of its operating system, Windows 10, is due to be released next month. The company said PCs and tablets running the software would go on sale on 29 July, at which point the OS would also be offered as a free download to existing users. The roll-out of the product for smartphones, Xbox games consoles and other kit will follow later. One expert said the release could prove critical to the Microsoft's fortunes. Windows 8 - the current iteration - has had a troubled life, with many deciding not to update to its touch-centric user interface. The...

A zero-day software vulnerability in the firmware of older Apple computers could be used to slip hard-to-remove malware onto a computer, according to a security researcher. Pedro Vilaca, who studies Mac security, wrote on his blog that the flaw he found builds on previous ones but this one could be far more dangerous. Apple officials could not be immediately reached for comment. Vilaca found it was possible to tamper with an Apple computer's UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface). UEFI is firmware designed to improve upon BIOS, which is low-level code that bridges a computer's hardware and operating system at startup....

A recycling facility in Silicon Valley is trying to trace a woman who dumped a rare Apple 1 computer, which just sold to a private collector for $200,000. The company wants to give her a cut of the proceeds: $100,000. The firm — CleanBayArea — said the woman dropped off boxes of old gadgets and “e-waste” one month ago, but didn’t leave any contact information. “She said that her husband had passed away and that she had decided to clean up their garage,” the company said in a statement. After searching through the boxes a few weeks later, a recycling...

Your Social Security Number can be stolen in under an hour. And hundreds of website run by the government, universities and financial institutions among other companies are at fault. ... ... ... It works essentially in the following way. Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6789? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6790? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6788? Yes! ... ... ... Very commonly all the hacker needs is: A victim’s last name A victim's birth date A vulnerable website the victim uses. ... ... ... Are any big players exposing SSN’s? I have a list of hundreds of websites who are...

FReepers - I've seen a number of folks mention that they don't have cable or dish and still watch TV. Anybody got any insight on using a digital antenna, Roku, computer and Netflix? And whether it's worth it?

MILPITAS (CBS/AP) — A recycling center in the Silicon Valley is looking for a woman who dropped off an old Apple computer that turned out to be a collectible item worth $200,000. Victor Gichun of Clean Bay Area says the woman dropped off boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her garage after her husband died. She didn’t want a tax receipt or leave her contact information, and it wasn’t until a few weeks later that workers at the recycling center opened the boxes to discover an Apple I (one) computer inside. It was one of only about...

People perusing Craiglist are typically looking for love or searching for bargains. This ad one of our readers stumbled upon certainly appears to offer the latter. It features a 1979 Volkswagen Bus — the kind of vehicle that generations of free spirits have transformed into hippie vans — selling for the incredibly low price of $35. Really. That's what it says. And even if you get bad vibes by the vehicle being located in Crook (it's a town in Logan County), perhaps the owner's flexibility will reassure you. After all, he isn't insisting on cash: He's willing to trade. But...

A new app lets annoyed cyclists or drivers harness the power of crowdsourcing to report illegally parked cars. “We’re not out here to ruin people’s lives or tow people endlessly,” Michael McArthur, co-founder of Toronto-based TowIt, told Fast Company.”It’s all a behavioral shift to make our societies function better. Really, we just want people to think about how their actions are impacting others.” McArthur and his business partner came up with the idea after a new Toronto mayor had come into office along with a towing initiative for cracking down on illegally parked cars clogging up streets. The team wanted...

This is apparently a graphic used by Microsoft to tout their forthcoming OS upgrade, "Windows 10." It's seems the braintrust in Microsoft's marketing department are a little weak on 20th century history, otherwise they'd have realized the phrase "One product family. One platform. One Store." sounds like is was ripped from the pages of a political propaganda manual. Yes, the fools in Redmond have -- I give them the benefit of the doubt for now -- unwittingly paraphrased one of the most notorious political catchphrases of all time: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer – "One People, One Empire,...

Now many of you are familiar with Milo Yiannopoulos. Many of you are not. You need to fix that about yourselves. As an openly gay man living in London, he’s also capable of verbally expressing his anti-authoritarian, freedom-centered principles better than our talking heads this side of the pond. Unshackled by the chains of political correctness, Milo really does offer a refreshing, challenging and wildly entertaining interview here. Also, for the first time, there’s an extended additional 45minute interview too raw for terrestrial radio! The guy deserves some support. Truly awesome.

On Friday, the second day of its annual developer conference, Google I/O, one of the search giant’s semi-secretive research divisions announced a project that aims to make conductive fabrics that can be weaved into everyday clothes. The effort, called Project Jacquard, is named for the French inventor of the Jacquard Loom, which revolutionized textile manufacturing and helped pave the way for modern computing. Much like the screens on mobile phones, these fabrics could register the user’s touch and transmit information elsewhere, like to a smartphone or tablet computer. They are made from conductive yarns that come in a rainbow of...

Lately I've noticed the product reviews on Amazon have become free of typos and misspellings and all errors in usage. This is absolutely weird if you think about it. For the longest time (years) these product reviews were peppered with grammatical errors, misspellings, punctuation errors and inconsistencies as one would kind of expect, coming as they did from purchasers who are not professional writers and who represent a cross section of varying educational and experience backgrounds. Now, however, the reviews from five stars on down to one star all read as though they've come straight out of Consumer Reports magazine....

The bug that causes an iPhone to collapse when it accepts a text message with a specific string of characters also affects other Apple products, such as iMacs, MacBooks, iPads and Apple Watches. A glitch within the central system common to all of Apple's iOS products that manages text messages causes the crash. When introduced with non-Latin special characters in a particular sequence, which includes Marathi, Arabic, and Chinese, the CoreText system chokes, pushing it to break down and terminate the whole operating system.Apple had informed several media outlets that the company is aware of the iMessage glitch and expect...