state

Here's the 3D-printing institute in Obama's State of the Union

A little over a year ago, 3D printing was a funky new technology that you might find at modestly sized booths in the basement level of the Las Vegas Convention Center at CES. Tonight, President Obama mentioned it in the same breath as Apple and Intel during his State of the Union address, while talking about ways to create new jobs and manufacturing in the United States. Here's the passage from the transcript:

After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from … Read more

Anonymous fails to shut down live streams of Obama address

Despite Anonymous' vows to block Web broadcasts of tonight's State of the Union address, the hacktivist collective failed to disrupt the president's speech.

Declaring that "there will be no State of the Union Address on the Web tonight," the loose-knit group announced earlier today its intention to block live streams of the address in protest of the president not mentioning issues during his speech that are important to Anonymous.

However, live streams originating from the White House's Web site and YouTube appeared unaffected during the president's speech.

Anonymous, which is famous for using distributed … Read more

Obama commends Apple, Intel for U.S. manufacturing jobs

One of President Obama's policy points in his State of the Union speech tonight was that U.S. companies need to create jobs here. Not only did he stress this need, he also praised those companies already in the process of doing this, including Intel and Apple.

"Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing. After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three," Obama said in his speech. "Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs … Read more

White House debuts 'enhanced' streaming for SOTU speech

The White House is debuting a new way to watch President Obama's State of the Union speech tonight -- it has created an "online-only enhanced" live stream that lets viewers both watch in real time and see different policy charts, stats, and data.

Obama mentioned the live stream on his Twitter page:

Watch Obama's #SOTU address with enhanced graphics, charts, and useful stats on his plan to keep us moving forward: OFA.BO/eJ9Z7k

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 12, 2013

This "enhanced" live stream seems to be geared toward people who don't have … Read more

Anonymous intends to block Webcasts of State of the Union

The online hactivist collective Anonymous intends to block Webcasts of President Obama's State of the Union address this evening because of what it calls a lack of attention to issues important to the group.

"There will be no State of the Union Address on the Web tonight," the group said today in a blog post announcing the effort, which it has code named #opSOTU.

Specifically, the group says it objects to Obama not addressing the prosecution of Web activist Aaron Swartz, the long detention of alleged WikiLeaker Bradley Manning, wireless wiretapping, the targeted killings of U.S. … Read more

Microsoft Surface Pro shows off its inner ultrabook

Is the Surface Pro a tablet or a laptop? Well, let's put it this way: benchmarks put it squarely in the laptop category, leaving Apple and Android tablets in the dust.

Chip review site Anandtech ran benchmarks on the solid-state drive in Microsoft's new Surface Pro tablet, underscoring the performance gap with the flash drive in Apple's iPad 4.

It's a "full blown" SSD, wrote Anand Shimpi of Anandtech, referring to Micron Technology's C400 solid-state drive in the Surface that Anandtech tested.

The Micron SSD posted speeds of 400 megabytes-per-second when reading data … Read more

Top five Thunderbolt storage devices: Performance meets capacity

The Thunderbolt technology can be applied to a lot of things, but currently, the most popular use is in storage products. In this regard, it's similar to USB 3.0 but offers about twice the transfer speed, and you can also daisy-chain as many as five storage devices together using a single Thunderbolt port without degrading the data rates.

Despite the fact that Thunderbolt has gone multiplatform, most Thunderbolt storage devices are geared toward Macs. And their pricing, while progressively getting lower since Thunderbolt was first introduced a few years ago, is still quite high when compared with USB … Read more

Amazon, Overstock argue in NY court against sales tax demand

Amazon and Overstock are duking it out with New York state in a court battle over the issue of collecting sales tax.

In a case being heard by the State of New York Court of Appeals, attorneys for both retailers claimed yesterday that a 2008 New York law requiring them to collect sales tax on online purchases is unconstitutional, as reported by Reuters.

A 1992 Supreme Court decision found that retailers can't be forced to collect sales tax on out-of-state purchases unless they have a physical presence in those states. But the New York law skirted that decision. The … Read more

Dueling disks: Apple's 128GB response to Surface Pro

With the 128GB iPad, Apple is obviously trying to steal thunder from Microsoft's Saturday roll out of the Surface Pro. But that doesn't mean you can equate the iPad's disk performance with the Surface Pro's.

Apple's carefully-timed release of the 128GB iPad ostensibly puts the iPad's storage on par with Microsoft's 128GB Surface Pro, which will go on sale Saturday.

Well, not quite.

Apple is using a flash drive optimized for power efficiency, while Microsoft's solid-state drive favors speed -- the same kind of drive used in ultrabooks. (And Apple's MacBooks, … Read more