Judy’s Tech News Digest

Facebook Getting Into Virtual Reality

After recently purchasing Whatsapp, Facebook bought a virtual reality company, Oculus VR, this week for $2 billion in stock and cash.  Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for Oculus include having it provide “completely new kinds of experiences”, of which gaming will obviously be one.

Mr. Zuckerberg is certainly no stranger to controversy and the surprise takeover has prompted an outcry across social media platforms, including on Facebook itself. Games developers are labeling the founders behind Oculus VR as ‘sellouts’ for agreeing to the deal with Facebook. Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson was so disappointed by the acquisition he immediately departed the Oculus project, saying in his post… “Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers.”

Twitter Dumping ‘Retweet’

Twitter is doing away with ‘Retweet’.  You can still ‘retweet’ but you will be asked if you want to ‘Share with Followers’ instead of ‘Retweet to Followers.’  ‘Share’ is more social media-speak than ‘Retweet.’

This has already been rolled out to some users and should be coming to all Twitter users soon.

Tablet Sales To Continue Rising – PC Sales To Continue Dropping

According to the latest stats from information technology research and advisory company Gartner, consumers will continue to snap up the latest gadgets in 2014, but unsurprisingly, tablets and smartphones will appear in more shopping baskets than traditional PCs.

Gartner is predicting that worldwide shipments of desktops and laptops will finish at 276.7 million this year, down from 296.1 million last year. And that will drop even further to 263 million by 2015.

Meanwhile, Gartner is predicting that tablet sales will enjoy a nice jump in 2014 and beyond… from 195.4 million units shipped in 2013 to 270.7 million this year and 349.1 million in 2015.

Facebook, Twitter & Google Sued Over “Incomprehensible” Privacy Policies

A French consumer group has filed a lawsuit against the big 3 – Google, Facebook, and Twitter – claiming the companies’ privacy policies are too complex for the average user to make sense of. According to UFC-Que Choisi, the big 3 companies’ terms and conditions are… “incomprehensible, illegible, and filled with hyperlinks.” 

The group has asked a French judge to order the removal or modification of the vast number of contentious clauses imposed by these companies.

I couldn’t comment on this myself, I’ve never read through any of these privacy policy terms and conditions, they are far too complex and ambiguous for me to comprehend. 🙂

 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Z Graphics Card Launches At $3000 a Pop!

The demand for bigger and better graphics cards appears to be continuing unabated. We’ve seen graphics cards priced at hundreds of dollars and even $1,000 in the past, but NVIDIA has taken it to a whole new level with its GeForce GTX Titan Z.

This new graphics card from NVIDIA will set the high end PC gamer, or anyone who wants a supercomputing rig, back $3,000, making it more expensive than most entire PCs.

• You can read all about the new card and its specs here: Introducing the GeForce GTX Titan Z

At $3000 a pop, I just want to know if it will make my morning coffee for me.