Miscellaneous

Cisco shares rose by 6.8 percent on Tuesday after the bell as the networking giant published a rather solid earnings report for the first fiscal quarter of 2013.

The San Jose, Calif., based corporation reported a net income of $2.1 billion, or 39 cents a share (statement). Non-GAAP earnings were 48 cents a share on a revenue of $11.9 billion -- up by 6 percent on an annual basis.Wall Street was expecting Cisco to report first quarter earnings of 46 cents per share on revenue of $11.78 billion.Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers asserted … Read more

It was quite a charge.

That's the thought that may cross a mind or two after hearing the story of 28-year-old Darren Kersey.

Kersey is homeless, but he has a cell phone.

A logistical issue for him is where to charge it. So, as the Sarasota Herald-Tribune has it, he went to the public picnic shelter in Gillespie Park. It has a charging station.

At 9:20 p.m. on Sunday, Sgt. Anthony Frangioni of the local police wasn't happy with Kersey's ingenuity. He arrested him for the "theft of city utilities."

Frangioni allegedly added … Read more

Sometimes, the little bars on your cell phone just aren't there.

It could be because you're somewhere remote and it doesn't pay for phone companies to put a tower there. It could be because you're somewhere remote and the locals believe a cell tower would blight their aesthetic pleasures.

Or you could be in the middle of San Francisco and have AT&T.

My guess is 16-year-old Vera Oliphant was probably in category one when she reportedly wandered around, trying to find a cell signal. She wanted to call her mom and text her boyfriend. … Read more

If you're a parent, you're probably already panicking about how to satisfy your children during the season of goodwill hunting for material goods.

I am here to help. For I have just been given the results of a survey conducted for online cashback shopping site Ebates.

It's a survey that delved deep into the complicated covetous minds of kiddies and emerged with fascinating results.

It seems that older kids and younger kids have very different ideas about what Santa should shove in their stockings.

Among the 16- to 18-year-olds, there seems considerable consensus that their one heart'… Read more

The slow demise of cursive handwriting is not a new story, but lately the death knell has been tolling a little louder. In a recent example, the State Board of Education of Kansas is about to debate the role of cursive lessons in the schools amid a nationwide decline in those lessons.

School districts large and small have been phasing out cursive. Verona, Wis., will phase out most third-grade cursive instruction by 2014. Indiana formally de-emphasized cursive last year in favor of pushing proficiency in keyboard use.

Common Core State Standards for what students are expected to learn have been picked up by most of the states in the union. Those standards don't require cursive. Keyboarding skills, however, are featured in the writing standards. That means most states no longer have a mandate for teaching cursive.… Read more

I am sure you'd watch. I am sure your kids would be fascinated.

And yet, it is not to be. The BBC will not be doing a live show in which scientists try to talk to aliens.

You might be wondering why this would be.

Thankfully, Professor Brian Cox, a celebrated particle physicist and TV presenter (and former member of the band D:Ream), revealed that Britain's most august news source was a little scared of the kind of news it would make.… Read more

Besides President Obama, the big winner on Election Day was big data.

Big data's patron saint -- FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver -- won the battle to predict the outcome of the contest between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Where breathless pundits brandishing equivocating polls shouted from the rooftops over the last few weeks that the race for the White House was a "toss-up," or "too close to call," Silver and other poll aggregators sat back and calmly told anyone who would listen that the math told another story: Obama's re-election was never … Read more

Google has launched a new service designed to get users in developing countries to access its core offerings.

Dubbed Free Zone, the service is launching first in the Philippines starting today. Users in that country will be able to access Google Search, Gmail, and Google+ from their mobile devices without incurring any data charges.

In an interview with Reuters published today, Google product manager AbdelKarim Mardini said that the service is designed to take aim "at the next billion users on the Internet, many of whom will be in emerging markets and encounter the Internet first on a mobile … Read more

Lenovo seems to one of the few PC vendors thriving in a weak market.

For its fiscal second quarter that ended September 30, the Hong Kong-based company scooped up record sales of $8.7 billion, a jump of 11 percent from the prior year's quarter. PC shipments rose 10.3 percent, a healthy gain given that shipments for the overall industry fell more than 8 percent.

Based on data from IDC, Lenovo now holds 15.7 percent of the global PC market, its highest market share ever. It's also hot on the heels of No. 1 Hewlett-Packard, which … Read more