Sky UK to acquire Telefonica's Landline And Broadband Business For up to £200M

Sky already supplies fixed phone line and broadband on top of its TV services in the UK, but it's just announced it'll be gaining a few more customers. The company has shaken hands with Telefonica UK to purchase the latter's broadband and phone line business provided by the consumer-facing O2 and BE brands. As you would imagine, big bucks will change hands: Sky plans to fork over £180 million (around $273 million) right off the bat, and will write a cheque for up to a further £20 million (circa $30 million) "dependent upon the successful delivery and completion of the customer migration process by Telefonica UK." Regulators will need to give the deal the thumbs up before it's official, but if and when that happens, Sky will become the second biggest ISP in the UK after adding over 500,000 new customers to its books. Should everything progress as planned, the buyout will be completed by the end of April, which gives Rupert Murdoch just enough time to carry out the vault extension he'll need.

Update: If you're worried this transaction will impact anything you're currently signed up to, you can probably rest easy. O2 has tweeted one of our editors to report "there will be no material change to a customer's broadband service and no fundamental contract change." [Engadget]

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Watch Out Siri, IVONA Wants a Word... or Two.

Siri has enjoyed mild success since her debut on the iPhone 4S. She’s not the world’s greatest personal assistant, but she gets the job done most of the time, which is better than a lot of other voice recognition options out there.

Now Amazon is preparing to do battle with Siri thanks to a new digital assistant they just bought. Her name’s IVONA, and we’re pretty sure it’s not the same Ivona from Austin Powers.

Amazon announced today that they’ve acquired the Polish-based text-to-speech technology company IVONA Software. You can actually find IVONA in a lot of Amazon products already. The Kindle Fire uses IVONA for its text-to-speech, voice commands, and Explore by Touch features.

The acquisition will help Amazon beef up the features on their tablets so that they can better compete with the iPad and Galaxy Nexus. It’s also been rumored that Amazon plans to make their own smartphone in the near future, so IVONA will add some voice service features that will be needed to compete against the iPhone and Samsung’s lineup of new devices.

Dave Limp, Vice President of Amazon’s Kindle division, said in a statement today:

“IVONA’s exceptional text-to-speech technology leads the industry in natural voice quality, accuracy and ease of use. IVONA is already instrumental in helping us deliver excellent accessibility features on Kindle Fire, including Text-to-Speech, Voice Guide and Explore by Touch. The IVONA team shares our passion for innovation and customer obsession, and we look forward to building great products to deliver world-class voice solutions to customers around the world.”

Get ready to put your boxing gloves on Siri. IVONA is ready to throw down.

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The Motherboard Dilema!

Continued...

Chapter 3


The Motherboard.

The motherboard is the core of the machine. Imagine the motherboard like the foundation of a house.

The motherboard is the first item you should acquire, when you start building a computer from scratch. It needs to be compatible with the processor, the RAM, and the graphics card. In reality, the processor, the graphics card, and the RAM, need to be compatible with the motherboard. Confused yet? I will explain.

The motherboard choice is very important. Before you purchase it, you need to ask yourself what processor you are going to choose for your build. This is an easy one, you are either buying Intel or AMD. I wrote all about these in the first chapter.

Let's assume you are going with an Intel CPU, you will need to buy an Intel motherboard. The memory RAM also needs to be compatible with the motherboard. In the motherboard manual, it normally has a section on processor compatibility. If it does not, you will most likely find it online in the manufacture's website. It will also describe what memory modules offer the best compatibility.

Read the manual, it provides valuable information.

For a core i7, i5 or i3, the motherboard socket, or slot where you will fit the processor in, is Socket 1156. There are also some that use Socket 1155, Socket 2011 and Socket LGA 1136. The choice of socket is yours, the prices vary quite a bit. Once you choose the model, Socket and speed of your processor you will then buy a motherboard with that Socket.

The RAM will be DDR3, so, once you read the motherboard manual you will know what to buy. Another thing you will have to consider is the Graphics Card. Most motherboards offer an incorporated graphics solution, this is usually very basic and unless your needs are browsing web pages and writting letters, this will not do the job. If your needs are this basic, you can use the on board graphics and upgrade to a better graphics package at a later stage. For this, you will have to make sure you will purchase a motherboard with on board graphics, some might not have this facility.

There are also many companies that manufacture motherboards. The prices vary from about £50 for the budget ones, to about £400 for the high end models. The companies I would recommend are; Biostar, Asus, Gigabyte, Asrock and Intel. There are others but these, in my opinion, are the best.

So now the trick is to match everything up and you will have the core of a machine. You will still have other things to buy and more choices to make when it comes to the HDD or SSD, the Power Supply, the Optical Drive and other peripherals. These are the most expensive though and here is where you really have to think about what you want to achieve with the system you are building.

I hope these tips and general information helped you, on your quest to build the perfect PC.


Thanks for reading and all the best!

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