Category: News

At LA PC Fixer we also try to stay on top of coming developments in the IT industry that is just beginning to radically change our ways of doing business and interacting with one another.

Toward that end, we’ve been following developments at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to report back to our Los Angeles audience on the latest trends in computing (and computer repair issues!)  One of the interesting notes struck this week was by Intel’s CEO who sees a profound coming revolution in computing that is more personal and intimate to the average user: it’s going to go with you EVERYWHERE in the near future. (That might be a good thing, as looking for instant info on Brentwood restaurants while I’m driving through West L.A. can be really useful). Apparently, Computer repair in Los Angeles is won’t just be about responding to calls for service- we’ll have to be more mobile than ever  because computer users will be also.

Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini sees personal computing being integrated in nearly every aspect of people’s lives, and he wants Intel processors to be the center of all that technology.

During his Thursday keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev., Otellini demonstrated advances in mobile device applications, 3D content, smartphones and areas not usually thought of in personal computing, namely home energy management and digital signage.

“Computing is no longer confined to your computer — it’s everywhere,” Otellini said.

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Filed under: Earnings/Financials

No one likes to bandy on with clichés, but in some cases avoiding a cliché is to ignore a long history of facts and experience that brought it into existence. The cliché we speak is the one about hurling good money after bad. After the government hosed down GMAC with another $3 billion, Uncle Sam’s stake in GM and Chrysler‘s official lender is anywhere from 56 percent to 70 percent depending on the kind of shares the government holds.

The money IV, though, hasn’t come close to stemming the losses at GMAC – specifically its Residential Capital unit that was a subprime lending fiend not so long ago. The parent company looks to report a $10B loss for 2009 – its largest yearly loss ever – due to a fourth quarter loss of $5B, which also sets a company record for one quarter.

As to the wisdom of combining good money and bad, the government doesn’t have a lot of choice: other bailed-out banks’ lending practices would make Scrooge say, “Wow, that’s stingy,” and if GMAC goes under then a lot of GM and Chrysler dealers take fatal hits. Nevertheless, don’t expect this year to bring better results: delinquencies will peak next year while home prices bottom out, and the government’s subsidies for mortgage-holders will probably end this year. All of that probably equals a prognosis that could come from the Book of Cataclysm: “Let there be pain.”

[Source: Business Week | Image: Craig Jones/Getty]

GMAC to post $10B loss after U.S. govt takes the wheel? originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have you ever been in in the gym hitting a really good workout and suddenly a sad slow song comes on and kills your buzz? Philips’ Activa Portable Audio Player has a good solution to this problem. The designers put this together with the intention of optimizing your workout in every way. It helps provide motivation by arranging your music by energy levels. It also provides real time vocal feedback on how your doing. If you slow down it will encourage you vocally. If you speed up it will select a song with a faster tempo.

Of course this will take an initial set up process of analyzing your music and selecting songs that motivate you, but that is sure better then trying to do that on your own in the middle of a workout. If you’d rather avoid that whole process though, you can just use the presets right out of the box and get started. Vocal feedback is also a plus because you don’t have to look down and fidget with a device to monitor your progress, you just listen. The unit itself is designed for action with  sport headphones with ear hooks, clip-on design, protective pouch, and cable clip management. Will be available in April for about $130. See Philips for more information soon.

The hiring of temporary workers is a leading indicator of future job growth, and new employment numbers suggest the U.S. economy may be on the road to recovery.

Last month, temporary employment rose 2.5%, seasonally adjusted, according to the Labor Department’s employment report. “As employers feel more secure, they bring back furloughed workers, lengthen the hours for existing workers and then bring on temporary staffers,” says Richard Wahlquist, president and chief executive officer of the Alexandria, Va.-based American Staffing Association. “These are the classic early stage of recovery.” Interim job creation typically precedes standard job growth by three to six months, says Mr. Wahlquist.

It’s also common for employers to convert temporary hires into staff employees, says Brett Good, district president of Robert Half International, a staffing company based in Menlo Park, Calif.

“Six to nine months ago, the jobs available were truly temporary,” Mr. Good says. “Now people are being brought in on a project basis, and employers are indicating that these positions will be rolled over into permanent payroll once the economy stabilizes.”

After cutting so deeply into infrastructure during the recession, companies are at a breaking point, adds Mr. Good. They simply can’t increase productivity without adding to the head count, he says.

Growing sectors include financial services, manufacturing and information technology, says William Grubbs, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Spherion, a staffing firm based in Fort Lauderdale, Fl. “Moving forward, we’re also going to see even more growth in the more high-end professional sectors,” he adds.

Meanwhile, with 15 million people out of work, competition for even temporary positions will be stiff, warns Mr. Wahlquist. “Companies will see talent pools as deep and rich as they’ve ever been,” he says. “But the job market will continue to seem brutal.”

When the Copenhagen climate summit ended in disappointment and finger-pointing, we saw again just how difficult it would be to get the world’s nations on board for an agreement to lower greenhouse emissions and slow global warming. This week brings another reminder of how far away we are from meaningful action: We can’t even get past the difference between weather and climate.

It’s bitter cold this week, even for January. Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981 [AP]. The southern United States is in the grip of freezing weather; the Midwest has seen dangerously cold wind chills far below zero. Trying to stave off the inevitable “where’s your global warming now” chants, the AP and other news sources rushed to run pieces trying to get across—one more time—that weather isn’t climate. The chants came, inevitably. But despite pundits and columnists who try to conflate the two to take the same old swings at global warming, a single bout of cold weather—or hot, for that matter—doesn’t actually say diddly squat about long-term climate patterns.

However, if one can set aside for a moment climate politics as usual and this weather-is-climate misunderstanding, the short-term weather patterns at play in our current spell of frigidity are pretty interesting. Whatever happened to this year’s El Niño, for instance? Shorter-term, naturally variable patterns such as El Niño account for seasonal differences — making one winter warmer or colder than another. But it takes a strong El Niño to dominate the pattern of a U.S. winter with unusually warm and dry conditions across the northern tier of the country, and cooler and wetter weather across the south, and the current El Niño is not strong [Discovery News].

In addition, there’s the curious case of the current Arctic Oscillation, which is rather out of sorts. Essentially, air pressure is measured at various places across the Arctic and at the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere – about 45 degrees north, roughly the latitude of Milan, Montreal or Vladivostok. The difference between the average readings for the two latitudes gives the state of the Arctic Oscillation index [BBC News]. A positive reading means high pressure in the mid-latitudes and low pressure at the pole; a negative reading means it’s the opposite. And what we see right now is an “extraordinary negative plunge” to levels not seen since at least 1950, Andy Revkin shows at his New York Times blog. What these conditions mean is that cold air spills out of the Arctic down to mid-latitudes, which this time round includes much of Europe, tracts of the US and China [BBC News].

As you can see in the historical chart of the Arctic Oscillation, it’s a pretty scattershot phenomenon. But it’s an important one, which could help to explain why it’s frigid in the continental United States but unseasonably nice in some far northern locales. In 2001, after analyzing its impact on Northern Hemisphere winters, University of Washington researchers suggested that effects of the Arctic Oscillation on weather patterns “appear to be as far-reaching as those triggered by El Niño in the South Pacific” [Discovery News]. Jack Williams has more about this.

Related Content:
80beats: The New Murder-Mystery Game: Who Killed Copenhagen?
The Intersection: Fox News Presents a Classic “He Said, She Said” on Climate Science
The Intersection: Sounds Familiar
The Intersection: How the Global Warming Story Changed, Disastrously, Due to “ClimateGate”
DISCOVER: The Next Ice Age

Image: flickr / bsabarnowl

Sometimes there simply are no words: A British man is resting in a UK hospital after he got his penis stuck in a metal pipe and had to have it freed by an industrial metal grinder.

According to The Metro, the 40-year-old unidentified man showed up at Southampton General Hospital in the UK where doctors were unable to remove the pipe. The Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service had to be called in to safely cut the pipe off using a grinder in what a spokesman said was a “delicate operation.”

The penis in queston was left bruised and swollen, but is expected to heal.

This is a unique new table side alarm clock that also doubles an iPod dock. Turn the speaker anyway you choose and the clock will rotate over for you. Up close and personal the sound is amazing and when it launches soon it will be available in silver with other colors to follow. Check out iLuv for more info soon.

by Josh Freed

Whether it was steel, the railroad, the automobile, or the Internet,
America’s leadership in technological innovation has made it the
world’s economic power for the last 100 years. Today, we’re on the
brink of the next revolution with the transition to clean energy. Of
course, new technologies inevitably push old ones aside—personal
computers, for example, killed typewriter industry in the 1980s.

The transition to clean energy will inevitably have the same effect.
While many communities will immediately prosper from new solar and wind
plants or advanced battery production, others will initially lose jobs
and even businesses or industries. Yet these same communities that
might suffer during the transition, particularly those in the
industrial Northeast and Midwest and rural South and Plains, could
capitalize on clean energy. They just don’t have access to the economic
tools to do it on their own. That is why Third Way worked with Rep. Dan
Maffei (D-N.Y.) to develop Clean Energy Business Zones (CBiZ).

CBiZ recognizes that the private sector and particularly small
businesses—not government—are in the best position to create new
jobs. It creates specific incentives for these businesses to locate in
areas that have skilled workers or a modern infrastructure but have
lost jobs or been economically disadvantaged by the change from
conventional to clean energy. This will help spur growth in areas that
too often in the past missed the economic benefits of innovation.

Make no mistake, this is not just about creating the next Microsoft or
securing a massive wind turbine factory. In places like Rep. Maffei’s
Syracuse-area Congressional District it could also mean the difference
for a contractor who wants to expand his building efficiency business
or allow a researcher to hire the staff she needs to manufacture a new
type of LED lighting.

This program would be modeled on the successful Empowerment Zone
program, but would be distinct and would focus specifically on helping
communities take advantage of clean energy. The zones would provide
businesses substantial financial incentives to build such sectors
including employment tax credits, increased business expense
deductions, and favored capital gains treatment.

America has led virtually every technological revolution of the past
century. We’ll do it again with clean energy. But we have the
opportunity to make sure that communities that missed out on the
economic booms of past transformations don’t miss out yet again. The
CBiZ program is one important tool we can use to help American business
grow where growth is needed most.

Related Links:

Community-Owned Clean Energy

The policy and politics of Obama’s $2.3 billion in clean energy tax credits

How do I find a green job?

In 2007, Wired Magazine published an article entitled the See-Through CEO where Redfin founder Glenn Kelman gained the public’s sympathy and a slew of new members by blogging his corporate woes. Lately we’ve been looking inward at how companies can improve their employee recruitment strategy through social media. Great candidates research you before accepting an offer, and here is what your social media profile reveals to them.

Sponsor

LEARNING: A few months ago Bessemer Associate Sarah Tavel wrote an article entitled Venture Capital’s Freemium Model. Tavel explains that her firm gives away free advice via blogs, tweets and white papers. The point of all this is to display their knowledge to potential portfolio companies and make startups understand the value of Bessemer’s advice. By this same reasoning we can assume that CEOs who blog establish themselves as thought leaders and attract better employees.

TRANSPARENCY: Flybridge Capital Partners’ Jeff Bussgang gives transparency and accessibility as reasons for his blogging. Says Bussgang, “The VC business can be an intimidating business to many.  I am an iconoclast at heart.  As a former entrepreneur, I particularly enjoy breaking down barriers and making the VC business more accessible and transparent for others.” Make your business accessible to both employees and potential hires. Rather than waiting for scheduled meetings to celebrate your successes or public partnerships, give others the option of reading about developments as they happen. You might even get some useful feedback in the comments.

HAPPINESS: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a permanent public record of what you do or say?” Hsieh argues that Twitter adds a public broadcast element that reminds him to be more positive, thankful and empathetic. He writes that those same values trickle down to the corporate culture of Zappos. As a company voted one of Fortune Magazine’s Top 100 Companies to Work for in 2009, Hsieh makes a great case for using social media as a recruitment tool.

Discuss

We give them 10 seconds; they give us the best pitch they can huck.

A lot of people go into a cosmetic surgeon‘s office and request an eyelid lift procedure to correct an excess of skin that they have in their upper eyelids. Many times the actually problem lies within their brow and a brow lift is the answer. In these patients, the brow itself has actually fallen and has resulted in a “bunching” of upper eyelid skin. With an aggressive removal of skin during an eyelid lift, typically the brow will be pulled further down which will just make the issue even worse and can sometimes create a tired or weary appearance.

I love Casio slow motion cameras, even if their stills are generally not all that great. The new EX-FH100 is pocketsized, has a 10x zoom and a new 120frame per second mode that doesn’t have low light issues. Love it.

Older cameras would be impossible to use at 300FPS indoors, because the grain and exposure would become an issue. A quick test on the floor of CES showed that even zoomed in, the 120FPS mode, benefiting from the highly light sensitive backlit CMOS, did really well. And truthfully, 120FPS is better for sports, etc than 300FPS, in my opinion. The 120FPS mode also has another benefit — 640 x 480 pixel res, which is more usable than the old 300FPS mode’s 512 x 384 res. It has modes up to 1000FPS, though.

I’m getting one of these, without a doubt.

A Chicago man was sentenced today to 55 years in federal prison for enticing two minor boys to engage in sexual activity after having committed previous sex crimes against minors and while registered as a sex offender, announced Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

The defendant, Matthew Calek, 28, of Chicago, received a mandatory 10-year sentence as part of the 55-year total prison term because he was a registered sex offender when he committed the new crimes.

The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen in Federal Court in Chicago. Calek faced a maximum sentence of life in prison and the advisory United States Sentencing Guidelines called for a sentencing range between 30 years and life imprisonment.

“This sentence will incapacitate this defendant and guarantee that he will inflict no further harm upon young victims for the foreseeable future, and we hope that it helps deter the conduct of other sexual predators and spares other potential victims,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.

According to court documents, in the summer of 2006, Calek used a social networking site, MySpace.com, and online chats to lure a 14-year-old boy from his home in Pennsylvania to Chicago, where Calek raped the boy.

In the fall of 2006, Calek deceived a 17-year-old minor into engaging in repeated sex acts by posing as an MTV movie producer; then tried to extort the boy for more sex by threatening to distribute DVDs of the sex acts at the boy’s high school.

At the same time, Calek amassed a collection of images and videos of children being sexually abused. At the time he committed these crimes, Calek was on federal supervised release for a previous federal child-exploitation conviction, and was registered in the State of Illinois as a sex offender.

Calek was indicted in April 2008 for possessing child pornography and obscene material, in addition to the enticement counts, to which he pleaded guilty in April 209.

Judge Andersen sentenced Calek to a total of 660 months on the two enticement counts, including a mandatory consecutive 10-year prison term for committing the crime while being a registered sex offender. He also imposed lifetime supervised release and ordered restitution to one of the victims.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The government is being represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie B. Porter.

MEDIA CONTACT:

United States Attorney’s Office, 312-353-5300
Northern District of Illinois

Less than a week before its scheduled debut, Our Little Genius has beeb removed from the FOX schedule. Hosted by Kevin Pollak, Genius features academically accomplished kids ages 6-12 answering tough questions for the chance to win hundreds of thousands of dollars. The first eight episodes have been yanked by producer Mark Burnett, who says he recently discovered “an issue” with how some information was relayed to the show’s young contestants that has led to his request that the network not air those episodes.

“I believe my series must always be beyond reproach, so I have requested that Fox not air these episodes,” Burnett, best known as the creator of Survivor and The Apprentice, said in a statement Thursday.

Mark Burnett Prods. will pay to reshoot the episodes, and will also pay the winnings to the contestants who took part in the original eight episodes.

“Even though we were incredibly pleased with the quality of ‘Our Little Genius,’ we respect and appreciate his due diligence and the decision to pull these episodes,” Fox said in a statement. “We agree there can be no question about the integrity of our shows.”

Our Little Genius was set to premiere after Wednesday’s edition of American Idol. FOX will instead air a repeat of the 450th episode of The Simpsons.

Filed under: Hybrid, Technology, BMW

BMW is knee-deep in hybrid technology these days, having both mild hybrids and sophisticated full two-mode drivetrains in production. Apparently, there’s work underway on a radical twin-engine system as well, proof of which can be seen by perusing this patent application.

Unlike any hybrid powertrain currently on the road, one of the engines in BMW’s split-hybrid technology remains completely dormant unless more power is needed than the first engine and electric motor combination can provide. The patent application specifies that each internal combustion engine would have two cylinders – a configuration that BMW has a great deal of experience in on the motorcycle side.

Like BMW’s current hybrid systems, the electric motor would be integrated into the transmission, and it seems that the two gasoline-fed engines are mounted together as one unit. We have no idea if the German automaker has plans to put such a system into production, but it’s obvious that it’s at least considering the possibility. Stay tuned.

[Source: BimmerFile]

Report: BMW working on twin-engine hybrid powertrain? originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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