Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers including: Microsoft investors push for Bill Gates to step down as chairman, the Lego calender that syncs up with smartphones, did Samsung rig the Note 3 to perform better in Benchmark tests?
- Fresh on the heels of Steve Balmer’s announced retirement, Microsoft investors are looking to push chairman Bill Gates out the door too. “Three of the top 20 investors in Microsoft Corp are lobbying the board to press for Bill Gates to step down as chairman,” reports Yahoo. The three investors reportedly hold more than five percent of the company’s stock between them.
- Our readers seem to be pretty big fans of Lego, if the response to our LEGO Builder iPhone Case competition was anything to go by. You should therefore be sufficiently enthralled by this video of a giant Lego calendar that syncs up with smartphones.
- A team of researchers from the University of Washington has developed a programming language that allows them to code a set of instructions to build DNA molecules. “We start from an abstract, mathematical description of a chemical system, and then use DNA to build the molecules that realise the desired dynamics,” one of the researchers explained. “The vision is that eventually, you can use this technology to build general-purpose tools.” You can check out the fruits of their labour at Nature Nanotechnology (although the full PDF will set you back $32. Tch.)
- Optus has announced that is has removed the credit card surcharge for consumer and small business customers who choose to use their credit cards to pay bills via direct debit. Customers had previously been hit with a 1% payment processing fee each month.
- Some sales are for sexy, exciting products. Others are just good value, like this one. Woolworths is currently selling $40 tubs of Bio Attack washing powder for just $8, while stocks last. [Via OzBargain]
- Ars Technica has accused Samsung of artificially inflating the Galaxy Note 3’s benchmark scores by as much as 20 percent. During its testing, the website discovered that certain benchmark programs would trigger maximum 2.3GHz CPU speed on all four cores of the Snapdragon 800 processor while that same benchmark test just re-named would show three of the four cores completely shut off and the other running at 300MHz. The result is rigged results that do not reflect the phone’s real life performance. You can read more about the smartphone “juicing” scandal here.
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