Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Smartphone sales are down across the board, and that means component vendors like Qualcomm are also feeling the heat. The company's Q3 2023 earnings (Qualcomm's fiscal year is October-September) have handset chip sales down 25 percent year over year, with net income down 52 percent year over year. The company also issued lower-than-expected guidance for the next quarter, all causing the stock to drop around 8 percent in the aftermath of the call.

Like most other tech companies, Qualcomm's response to the less-than-stellar earnings is to cut costs via layoffs. Earlier this year the company cut 415 jobs at its San Diego headquarters, but the company's securities filing revealed more cuts are coming.

"Given the continued uncertainty in the macroeconomic and demand environment, we expect to take additional restructuring actions" the filing says. "While we are in the process of developing our plans, we currently expect these actions to consist largely of workforce reductions, and in connection with any such actions we would expect to incur significant additional restructuring charges, a substantial portion of which we expect to incur in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. We currently anticipate these additional actions to be substantially completed in the first half of fiscal 2024." Qualcomm has around 51,000 employees.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Smartphone sales are down across the board, and that means component vendors like Qualcomm are also feeling the heat. The company's Q3 2023 earnings (Qualcomm's fiscal year is October-September) have handset chip sales down 25 percent year over year, with net income down 52 percent year over year. The company also issued lower-than-expected guidance for the next quarter, all causing the stock to drop around 8 percent in the aftermath of the call.

Like most other tech companies, Qualcomm's response to the less-than-stellar earnings is to cut costs via layoffs. Earlier this year the company cut 415 jobs at its San Diego headquarters, but the company's securities filing revealed more cuts are coming.

"Given the continued uncertainty in the macroeconomic and demand environment, we expect to take additional restructuring actions" the filing says. "While we are in the process of developing our plans, we currently expect these actions to consist largely of workforce reductions, and in connection with any such actions we would expect to incur significant additional restructuring charges, a substantial portion of which we expect to incur in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. We currently anticipate these additional actions to be substantially completed in the first half of fiscal 2024." Qualcomm has around 51,000 employees.

Enlarge (credit: ALAIN JOCARD / Contributor | AFP)

Elon Musk is at the center of yet another legal battle over money allegedly owed by X, the company formerly known as Twitter. A French international news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), announced yesterday that it has taken legal action in the Judicial Court of Paris to compel X to provide the data needed to assess compensation owed for X users sharing AFP news content on the platform.

Musk's only reported response so far comes in a post formerly known as a tweet.

"This is bizarre," Musk wrote. "They want us to pay *them* for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t!?"

Enlarge (credit: ALAIN JOCARD / Contributor | AFP)

Elon Musk is at the center of yet another legal battle over money allegedly owed by X, the company formerly known as Twitter. A French international news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), announced yesterday that it has taken legal action in the Judicial Court of Paris to compel X to provide the data needed to assess compensation owed for X users sharing AFP news content on the platform.

Musk's only reported response so far comes in a post formerly known as a tweet.

"This is bizarre," Musk wrote. "They want us to pay *them* for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t!?"

Enlarge / Intelsat's Galaxy 37 satellite is the last of 12 new geostationary communications spacecraft launched over the last year to clear C-band spectrum. (credit: Maxar)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched early Thursday with the last of a dozen new C-band video relay satellites purchased by Intelsat and SES to help clear spectrum for the rollout of 5G wireless services in the United States.

Intelsat and SES, two of the world's largest geostationary communications satellites operators, are on track to receive nearly $9 billion in incentive payments from 5G cell network operators by the end of the year. The payments are due after Intelsat and SES clear the lower 300 MHz of C-band spectrum, which is being transitioned from satellite services to terrestrial 5G under the supervision of the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC auctioned the C-band spectrum for the rollout of 5G services in 2020. Verizon and AT&T took the lion's share of the $80 billion auction.

Enlarge / Intelsat's Galaxy 37 satellite is the last of 12 new geostationary communications spacecraft launched over the last year to clear C-band spectrum. (credit: Maxar)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched early Thursday with the last of a dozen new C-band video relay satellites purchased by Intelsat and SES to help clear spectrum for the rollout of 5G wireless services in the United States.

Intelsat and SES, two of the world's largest geostationary communications satellites operators, are on track to receive nearly $9 billion in incentive payments from 5G cell network operators by the end of the year. The payments are due after Intelsat and SES clear the lower 300 MHz of C-band spectrum, which is being transitioned from satellite services to terrestrial 5G under the supervision of the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC auctioned the C-band spectrum for the rollout of 5G services in 2020. Verizon and AT&T took the lion's share of the $80 billion auction.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

When Microsoft releases new test builds of Windows, there are usually a handful of features that are announced but only actually enabled for a small subset of testers. Sometimes it’s because the company is A/B testing a couple of different versions of the same thing or because Microsoft wants to roll out major changes to a few users before rolling them out to everyone.

Users normally have little control over whether new features actually appear in their Windows beta installs, but Microsoft has internal software called StagingTool that its own developers can use to switch things on and off themselves. And now StagingTool has leaked to the public, thanks to a “bug bash” the company is running this week to find and fix problems before the next big batch of new Windows features releases this fall.

As reported by The Verge, some bug bash participants were sent on “quests” that explicitly mentioned using the StagingTool to turn on specific features. Those quests and the tool itself have since been removed from Microsoft’s servers, but StagingTool is already being freely distributed among Windows enthusiasts who want more control over the features they see (Microsoft's official link is dead, and you should be careful when using third-party download links for any kind of executable file).