Autor: HCFG

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Signals from the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission are making Sprint(s s) and its SoftBank owners reconsider any possible bid for rival T-Mobile(s tmus), the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Merging two of the four remaining nationwide mobile carriers was always going to be a difficult sell, but the Journal reports that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son were surprised at the amount of resistance they encountered in recent talks with regulators. New FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has told Gigaom he doesn’t want to see the current level of mobile competition in the U.S. reduced. That doesn’t rule a Sprint-T-Mo deal out entirely, but it doesn’t look good either.

Rackspace(s rax) has long had an open-source bent, but it was focused on the OpenStack cloud project it helped create. As of last week, the San Antonio, Texas-based hosting and cloud provider said its employees can contribute to any and all open source projects that have an “established open-source license.” Van Lindberg, Rackspace VP of intellectual property for the company, blogged about the decision here.

What this policy shift means is that “Rackers” can contribute even to projects that might compete with what Rackspace is doing. However, if they want to do so,  but corporate guidelines require that tell Rackspace why they’re going that route. Oh, and the work must be done on their own time.

The Structure Show

Check out what Ford(s f) data scientist Mike Cavaretta has to say about what big data can mean to the design and sale of cars. Also Derrick Harris and I…

CoreCell Technology, the developers behind AeternoBlade, have revealed on Facebook that the game will be arriving on the Nintendo 3DS eShop on February 18th, with a $14.99 price tag. If you’re unsure about the game then there’s a demo on the Nintendo 3DS eShop which you can try out for free.

AeternoBlade follows protagonist Freyja’s quest for revenge, the lone survivor of a village that the devilish-looking Beladim burned down, presumably for funsies. As Freyja stumbles away from the blazing remains of her village, a stranger gives her the Aeterno Blade, which allows her to manipulate time. This lets players rewind their way out of deaths and slow down time in general. Besting enemies supplies Freyja with one of four orb types, which can be used to upgrade abilities or regenerate health, magic or Ultimate Points. Magic serves as the resource for time manipulation, while Ultimate Points fuel larger attacks.

As publishing tools have become cheaper and more distributed, many have benefited from this ongoing democratization of distribution — whether it’s Twitter (s twtr) users posting newsworthy updates from war zones, or would-be authors publishing their thoughts on Medium. That’s the power of a platform that allows anyone to publish. It’s when the line blurs between platform and publisher that things start to get tricky, not just for writers but for readers as well.

In a recent post at Re/code, Jonathan Glick of Sulia — which is itself both a social-media platform and a publisher — came up with a rather ugly portmanteau of a word to describe this phenomenon: he called them “platishers,” a term that not unsurprisingly unleashed a storm of ridicule from media insiders on Twitter.

My cat, adorable little creature that he is, got a little too much “me me me pet me” one day and knocked over an almost full adult beverage. The beverage was naturally right in the middle of a triangle with my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro at each point. Everything got a little damp. Not too wet to stop working, or so I thought, as everything continued to function just fine.

But I got to work the next day and noticed that the MagSafe light on my 2011 MacBook Pro wasn’t working. The laptop would get power through the MagSafe port, but would not charge the battery even after trying several adapters. I’d had problems with that port before, and I figured it had finally died on me. Later that day, I had a few OS X crashes and decided to re-run setup. This generated an error message that the SSD…

We kicked off our information about Windows 8.1 Update one with new taskbar features coming to Windows Store apps, namely the Jumplists and media controls. Today, I want to share with you another neat feature I uncovered. Windows Store (metro) applications running in multiple Windows show up in the taskbar as multiple windows. This behavior is the same in Desktop Applications since Windows 7. It is nice to see that it is being included in Windows Store applications.

A newly-developed low-power chip that will be shown off later this week could help people with cochlear implants ditch the hardware they currently have to affix to the outside of their ear, further easing use of the hearing-restoring devices.

Current cochlear implants use small batteries, similar to the ones used in watches, that must be replaced or recharged periodically. The new chip works with a battery that recharges wirelessly in two minutes, which gives it enough juice to last for eight hours.

“The idea with this design is that you could use a phone, with an adapter, to charge the cochlear implant, so you don’t have to be plugged in,” MIT electrical engineering professor Anantha Chandrakasan said. “Or you could imagine a smart pillow, so you charge overnight, and the next day, it just functions.”

The research team, which is composed of scientists from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratory, Harvard Medical…