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Microsoft currently offers OEMs a low-cost version of Windows 8.1 called Windows 8.1 with Bing. The OS is like the proper version of Windows 8.1 but the OEM cannot change the default search engine and it is less expensive to licenses as well; the OS is designed for entry level machines. The reason Microsoft has this SKU is so that it can have products at the low end of the market with prices that are competitive to Google's Chromebooks. Because Windows licensing fees are overhead to the purchase price, they can be restrictive to the floor the price of 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...

U.S. intelligence agencies have “harvested” the personal and private data of “hundreds of federal officials and judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg,” charges a legal brief filed by Larry Klayman, the attorney who has come to be known as “the NSA slayer” for his successful legal battles against the National Security Agency. Klayman, founder of FreedomWatch, successfully sued the National Security Agency in 2013 over the collection of telephone metadata from Verizon customers that was detailed in documents released by intelligence-document leaker Edward Snowden. In December 2013, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled the NSA...

Intel's recent results suggest a slowdown in firms leaving the ancient OS behind and upgrading to new systems. Why won't they update? Most interesting detail that emerged from Intel's lackluster first quarter financial results had nothing to do with mobile, the company's white whale. Instead, it concerned something so old that it almost seems laughable in the same week that the very 21st-century Apple Watch dominated headlines. Per ZDNet's own Larry Dignan: In a statement, Intel said it cut its first quarter outlook because of "weaker than expected demand for business desktop PCs and lower than expected inventory levels across...

Better late than never. Intel missed its March Compute Stick PC launch, but the chipmaker is now pushing out the micro-PC through pre-orders on sites like Newegg and Amazon. But will anybody buy it? Intel first mentioned the Compute Stick at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January. Although it wasn’t on display, the Compute Stick was announced as part of a CES-related press release. Intel described the Compute Stick as a “powerful PC packed into a package the length of a car key.” You can plug the Compute Stick into an HDMI port and transform any...

Eventually, the conventional ways of manufacturing microprocessors, graphics chips, and other silicon components will run out of steam. According to Intel researchers speaking at the ISSCC conference this week, however, we still have headroom for a few more years. Intel plans to present several papers this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the key academic conferences for papers on chip design. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr will also appear on a panel Monday night to discuss the challenges of moving from today's 14nm chips to the 10nm manufacturing node and beyond.

A Pentagon think tank conducted a study that claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin has Asperger's syndrome, "an autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions," according to a report. Putin's "neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy," wrote Brenda Connors, an expert in movement-pattern analysis at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She added that movements reveal "the Russian President carries a neurological abnormality."

January 17, 2015 Money Morning Michael A. Robinson writes: This year, 80% of the chips for new PCs will be produced in Silicon Valley… Taiwan… China‘s Shenzhen Province… South Korea… Wrong on all counts. More and more of today’s chipmakers locating their manufacturing facilities a bit off the beaten path these days – in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies… and a nation that some of you may find controversial. But my job is to take you wherever the biggest innovations are being made so that we can find the biggest opportunities. So, today I’m going to show you exactly...

Once more the spoiler. Despite the earnest persuasion of the White House to preserve a useful weapon in the war against the terrorists, the New York Times has revealed the workings of a covert surveillance program, indisputably within the law, to use administrative subpoenas to examine, through a Belgian financial consortium known by the acronym SWIFT, the financing of international terrorism. Once the story was out, the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal covered it as well. Now the program is damaged, perhaps severely so, and the financing of terror is harder to track. This is another unnecessary leak,...

When George W. Bush was president, a week didn't go by when the press wasn't dismissing his intelligence and proclaiming his administration's incompetence. Over the weekend, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan. Someone on his staff demonstrated truly jaw-dropping incompetence by accidentally releasing to 6,000 journalists the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan as part of Obama's welcoming delegation. That is a death sentence, not just for the agent but for all those around him. Try to imagine the media firestorm this would have created had the transgression occurred during the W...

Speed kills, and the iPhone goes from 0 to a good picture faster than anything else I was at Intel’s CES booth, composing a photo with my Android smartphone, when a pair of anonymous hands thrust a shining iPhone 6 Plus into my line of vision. A nonchalant tap of the camera shutter button later, the hands were pulling back, having captured a stupendously clear and sharp picture on the first attempt. By the time I’d completed my routine of setting proper focus and steadying myself, the dude who’d beaten me to a better shot with none of the effort...

Intel has taken a big if incomplete step toward rectifying the lack of diversity among its employees. Google, Apple, Facebook and other big companies in Silicon Valley -- now it's your turn.

Over the last year, Apple, Google and other big technology companies have faced mounting criticism by civil rights leaders about the lack of diversity in their work forces, which are populated mostly by white and Asian men. Now Intel, the giant chip maker, is taking more concrete steps to do something about it.

In the midst of the Russian government's tightening control on Internet use, Intel has shut down all of its Russian-language developer forums, blaming the country's new 'Blogger Law' that became effective on 01 January 2015. Users of the Russian developer forums are now being redirected to post on Intel pages hosted on third-party sites including Habrhabr, or to its own English developer forums outside of Russia. As part of the latest crack down, blog post contributions will be disabled; forum contributions will be disabled; in addition to turning off all commenting for Russian content.

Windows 10 is still in development at Microsoft, but Redmond’s partners claim that interest in new PCs has increased lately, especially after the software giant released the very first Windows 10 Technical Preview for testers. What’s more, millions of PCs are waiting right now for Windows 10, as the new operating system is already seen as a breath of fresh air for the collapsing PC industry which has suffered from dropping figures in the last couple of years. Windows 8 didn’t help, many said, so Windows 10 could definitely boost shipments, Intel’s executives explained during a recent press conference. Renee...

Revelations that the ISIS grew while President Obama skipped nearly 60% of his scheduled intelligence briefings has sparked harsh criticism from mostly GOP sources. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) characterized the missed briefings as “disturbing and possibly irresponsible. Is ignorance of what’s going on in the world behind what appears to be this Administration’s feckless foreign policy?” Former Vermont Governor and Democratic presidential aspirant Howard Dean dismissed the criticisms as “baseless. The erroneous premise is that any information that the President might have gleaned from any briefings would have altered his policy decisions. People who know the President are confident that...

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014. The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second. The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at...

When Obama called ISIS a JV team, they had taken Fallujah. US intel knew their capabilities, even though Obama Inc. has insisted on blaming bad intel for his dismissive comments.But the intel wasn’t bad. The intel is rarely that bad. It’s the leadership that’s bad. A former Pentagon official confirms to Fox News that detailed and specific intelligence about the rise of ISIS was included in the PDB, or the President’s Daily Brief, for at least a year before the group took large swaths of territory beginning in June.The official, who asked not to be identified because the PDB is...

Russia's policy on Western technology is clear: The country can live without it, especially if key issues like economic sanctions, NSA spying and GPS cooperation aren't resolved to its leader's satisfaction. It looks like this tough stance extends to US-designed computer chips too, as a Russian business newspaper is reporting that state departments and state-run companies will no longer purchase PCs built around Intel or AMD processors. Instead, starting in 2015, the government will order up to one million devices annually based on the "Baikal" processor, which is manufactured by a domestic company called T-Platforms.

My daughter just Honorably separated out of the Navy at the end of February after 8 1/2 years. Current TS and is looking for headhunters for Intel/Strike/TLAM. She's willing to contract to EU or ME. Does anyone have contacts for this type of position?