Tech Today w/ Ken May

Archive for June, 2013

When the iPhone got native panorama function in iOS 6, people started sharing tons of sprawling views. 360s of stadiums, the whole visible coastline at sunset. Laudable Facebook wallpapers all. But the urge to capture really wide shots didn’t start a few years ago, it began in the 1800s when photographers like George R. Lawrence realized that aerial technology could help them take new kinds of photos . Read more…        

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Check Out These Gorgeous Color Photos From World War II

Posted by kenmay on June - 30 - 2013

As the generation that fought World War II passes on, it can be difficult for younger people to remember that it was a war fought not by the elderly in black and white, but by millions of Americans in vivid color. These gorgeous images, via Shorpy , remind us just how vivid that war was. Read more…        

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XenServer 6.2 Is Now Fully Open Source

Posted by kenmay on June - 30 - 2013

First time accepted submitter Jagungal writes “Although the core Xen hypervisor has always been open source from the start, Citrix have now released the next version of their XenServer including all features and tools under an open source license. This includes also introducing a new XenServer.org community portal. The major change for users is that they now get all features from the licensed version for free but unless they pay for support, they have to do all security updates manually. Change logs for the new version 6.2 can be found here. It’s been a few years since Citrix started giving it away, free as in beer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support

Posted by kenmay on June - 29 - 2013

Billly Gates writes “The latest beta drivers for the Catalyst drivers control suite only list Vista as the lowest version they will support. We still have almost a year before Windows XP support finally ends. Will NVidia follow? So if you own a AMD system you will not receive audio, chipset, video, or any other drivers for your XP system and must upgrade or use an outdated legacy version. Looks like another death knell for this very long lasting platform.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death

Posted by kenmay on June - 29 - 2013

An anonymous reader writes “Remember AltaVista from the late ’90s? Yahoo is finally pulling life support and letting Altavista die a noble death after over 15 years of hard service.” You can only take so many years of being a running gag. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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We transmit almost a thousand petabytes of data over the ‘nets every month—an amount that’s growing exponentially, thanks to your narcissistic obsession with Snapchat. In fact, we’re quickly closing in on the limits of how much data optical fiber can transmit. Luckily, scientists at Boston University recently unveiled what could be the next generation of bandwidth tech. Read more…        

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As expected, in amongst the high profile acquisitions that have thus far marked the next step in Yahoo’s evolution , the web company is doing some serious house cleaning. EVP Jay Rossiter took to the exclamatory search company’s Tumblr to announced a whole slew of shut downs. The list includes properties old and new, from AltaVista to Yahoo Axis, along with the sunset date of each one (July 8th and June 28th, respectively). There are a dozen properties in all — you can check out the full list of obits in the source link below. Comments Via: TechCrunch Source: Yahoo Tumblr

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Can Google’s QUIC be faster than Mega Man’s nemesis, Quick Man? Josh Miller Google, as is its wont, is always trying to make the World Wide Web go faster. To that end, Google in 2009 unveiled SPDY , a networking protocol that reduces latency and is now being built into HTTP 2.0. SPDY is now supported by Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and the upcoming Internet Explorer 11 . But SPDY isn’t enough. Yesterday, Google released a boatload of information about its next protocol, one that could reshape how the Web routes traffic. QUIC—standing for Quick UDP Internet Connections—was created to reduce the number of round trips data makes as it traverses the Internet in order to load stuff into your browser. Although it is still in its early stages, Google is going to start testing the protocol on a “small percentage” of Chrome users who use the development or canary versions of the browser—the experimental versions that often contain features not stable enough for everyone. QUIC has been built into these test versions of Chrome and into Google’s servers. The client and server implementations are open source, just as Chromium is. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Are you ready to play everybody’s not-so-favorite guilt game: what was I doing at that age ? Ann Makosinski, a tenth grader from Victoria, British Columbia, has created a simple LED flashlight powered by body heat . So instead of having to recharge it or swap in a fresh pair of AAs every so often, you literally just need to hold it in your hand for it to start glowing. Read more…        

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LTE spectrum is a hot commodity, and if you’re hurting for cash, it might not be a bad time to let some go. US Cellular just inked a deal to unload 10MHz of Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum , padding its pocketbook with a whopping $308 million in cash. Pending FCC approval, that wireless load will be making its way over to T-Mobile , which would then own the vast majority of AWS. It’s good news for T-Mobile customers, no doubt, especially those in the Southeast — according to a press release, the spectrum T-Mob just snatched up covers 32 million people in cities like St. Louis, Memphis, Little Rock and New Orleans. Filed under: Wireless , T-Mobile Comments Via: The Next Web Source: T-Mobile

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