That Siri gal is certainly making the rounds these days. When she’s not answering your questions on a 4S, she’s showing up on iPads and elder iPhones. Not one to play favorites, Siri’s now lending her considerable talents to an iPod touch. Two enterprising young hackers, euwars and rud0lf77, are the ones who put Siri on the iPod, and you can see the results of their labor in the video after the break. Of course, Apple’s servers still aren’t as friendly as the virtual voice assistant, so Siri’s latest cameo remains a silent one — but some Siri’s better than foreveralone.jpg, right?

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Both analysts and Apple are warning that the price of hard drives, which has already been creeping upwards the past few weeks, could jump significantly in Q4 due to catastrophic floods taking place in Thailand. During Apple’s conference call this week, CEO Tim Cook said: “”Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point… We would say that our primary exposure is on the Mac…I’m virtually certain there will be an overall industry shortage of disk drives as a result of the disaster.”

Industry analysts have chimed in to agree with Apple, while Western Digital has been forced to close its plants. Thailand is the second-largest manufacturer of hard drives, and even companies like Samsung, which haven’t had to shut down production facilities, are facing part shortages. The HDD drive motor manufacturer Nidec, which supplies between 70-80 percent of the market with motors is expected to limit production due to flooding. Other companies potentially facing shortages include Hitachi, Seagate, and Toshiba.

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Founder Julian Assange told British media in London that the financial blockade against the website has drained the financial resources and he would need about $3.5 million to keep WikiLeaks going into 2013. At a news conference, Assange criticized a “dangerous, oppressive and undemocratic” that has cost WikiLeaks “tens of millions of dollars.” If additional financing is not secured, WikiLeaks will have to shut down “by the turn of the new year.”

WikiLeaks apparently receives only about $10,000 per month in donations and has been forced to suspend processing and publishing new leaks. Assange believes that the “blockade” that is being enforced by institutions such as Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union has reduced WikiLeaks revenue by as much as 95 percent.

To evade the blocking of payments, WikiLeaks recently used a strategy of small donations that were submitted via cellphones, but it apparently did not provide enough funds to secure the future of the site. Assange said that he is now pursuing donations from a “constellation of wealthy individuals.” There was no information who these individuals may be.

Assange spoke during a brief break from his house arrest at a news conference about 100 miles outside of London. He is still waiting for a decision whether the UK will follow Sweden’s request to extradite him on accusations that he sexually abused two women during a stay in Sweden in 2010.

SOURCE via USA Today

Listen up, GTA fans! Rockstar games today made a surprise announcement unveiling Grand Theft Auto V. The company didn’t provide anything in the way of details, instead opting to replace the official Rockstar website with a massive GTA V logo. Again, no word on when the game is launching, but the company’s splash page does include a promise of a trailer next Wednesday, November 2.

We’re assuming it’s going to be a 2012 launch, making it 15 years since the original GTA game launched. The most recent GTA game, GTA IV, was released in 2008. 2009 saw the release of three additional titles, the Ballad of Gay Tony, Chinatown Wars and the Lost and Damned.

Rockstar hasn’t mentioned which of its developer studios will be taking care of GTA V but it’s safe to assume Rockstar North, based in Scotland, will at least play a part.This particular branch of Rockstar Games has had a hand in developing every GTA title since San Andreas in 2004. From 1997 to 2002, the company developed GTA games under the name DMA Design.

During the call, CEO Warren East responded to some concerns that Intel is now entering ARM’s processor market within the Android ecosystem much more aggressively.

While he recognized that Intel is pouring huge resources into making its Atom chips work on Android, he told analysts that ARM’s product architecture is “more appropriate” for Android systems and will continue to be “more appropriate” than Intel’s products. One of the major advantages East sees for ARM are Mali (acceleration) cores, which are beginning to ship into the market now. “We are expecting tens of millions of Mali products shipping in 2011, driving the maturity of that ecosystem.”

ARM reported 1.9 billion ARM processors shipped in the third quarter of 2011. 1 billion of those chips were shipped into mobile phones and mobile computers, the company said. Cortex A processor shipments were up 300 percent year-over-year. East also disclosed that dual-core Cortex-A9 chips can now be found in 14 percent of smartphones that shipped in Q2.

On concerns that Intel is moving to 22 nm processors, and that the company is heavily relying on its manufacturing process as competitive advantage, East responded that ARM processors at 28 nm will be “happening really very, very soon.” However, 28 nm processor won’t account for a substantial margin of the market for 18 to 24 months he noted. 20 nm products are “a couple of years out as well”, East told analysts. He did not seem to be especially worried about Intel’s 22 nm processors.

SOURCE via ARM

Bloomberg reports that the software engineer behind iTunes, Jeff Robbin, is now working on an HDTV for Apple. The news follows Steve Jobs’ admittance to biographer Walter Isaacson that he had finally figured out how to build an integrated HDTV that wirelessly synchronized content with other Apple devices.

“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” Jobs told Isaacson in the biography “Steve Jobs,” released to bookstores yesterday by publisher Simon & Schuster.

According to the report, Apple already has a prototype in the works and may introduce an actual retail product by late 2012 or 2013. But one unnamed individual states that the existence of a prototype doesn’t actually mean Apple will release an HDTV product. As it stands now, the company hasn’t acknowledged that it’s developing any type of related product outside its current Apple TV box despite Steve Job’s biography.

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An Intel executive recently called for an industry-wide effort to bring the prices of the devices down and indicated that it will not be up to the chipmaker to hit price points that resonate with consumers.

“More work needs to happen in the ecosystem. Even if we’re giving the chips away for free, we couldn’t hit the price point we want to hit if we don’t work with the rest of the industry,” vice president of sales and marketing and general manager for the Asia-Pacific region Navin Shenoy told Reuters in an interview.

That is a bold statement that may not sit too well with some of Intel’s best customers, who are scrambling to get ultrabooks out for retail prices of less than $1000, which means that the actual cost to build those devices is somewhere in the $600 to $700 range.

According to Shenoy, about 40 percent of the consumer PC market may be occupied by ultrabooks by the end of next year, but this price-aggressive approach indicates that all Intel may be shooting for is a replacement of an existing market and not the opening of a new market – or a future market that builds on currently evolving trends, such as touch input models. As thin as ultrabooks are, they still follow the same general idea the original notebook, the 1984 Compaq LTE had: a keyboard and an attached screen.

Touch never made sense on mainstream notebooks before and I would express some doubt that touch will suddenly make sense if notebooks are simply as thin as a Macbook Air, which the ultrabook trend aims to replicate.

SOURCE via Reuters