Month: March 2013

“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

Nvidia’s Shield tablet can stream full PC games from your Steam library as long as you’re using a GeForce graphics card. This may be the best way to stream your PC games to your tablet. Andrew Cunningham In practically every one of its major press conferences since last year’s GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia has reminded us that they want to virtualize the graphics processor. The company wants to take it out of the computer on your lap or on your desk and put it into a server somewhere without you noticing the difference. It introduced the concept at GTC 2012. Then over the course of the next year, Nvidia unveiled the actual graphics cards that would enable this tech, started selling them to partners, and also stuck them in Nvidia Grid-branded servers aimed at both gamers and businesses . The difference between Nvidia’s initiatives and more traditional virtualization is that the company’s products support relatively few users for the hardware they require. The Grid gaming server supports 24 users per server box and the Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) only supports eight or 16 depending on the model. Most virtualization is all about dynamically allocating resources like CPU cycles and RAM to give as many users as possible the bare minimum amount of power they need. Instead, Nvidia’s is about providing a fixed number of users with a pretty specific amount of computing power, thus attempting to recreate the experience of using a regular old computer. There are situations where this makes sense. Given the cost of buying and maintaining workstation hardware, Nvidia’s argument for the VCA seems more or less convincing. But I’m slightly less optimistic about the prospect for the Grid gaming server, or any cloud gaming service, really—call it leftover skepticism from OnLive’s meltdown earlier this year . Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Cloud gaming” has a future—just maybe not in the cloud

RetroN 5 Console: Play All the Best Games From Your Wasted Youth

The coming of the Hyperkin RetroN 3 marked the end of doing a rain dance while blowing into your childhood SNES. And now Hyperkin is so excited about expanding compatibility that they’re skipping ahead and calling their next console RetroN 5 . More »

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RetroN 5 Console: Play All the Best Games From Your Wasted Youth

Why You’ll End Up Wearing a Smart Watch

People don’t wear watches anymore. You’ll look ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you just use your smartphone instead? These are just some of the negative sentiments skeptics are spewing about smart watches, which are still very much in their nascent stage. Guess what? They’re wrong. More »

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Why You’ll End Up Wearing a Smart Watch

Leaked Windows Blue build 9364 reveals multiple Live Tile sizes, same-width side-by-side apps

Want to get a first-hand look at Microsoft’s updated OS ? You might be able to download the unreleased Windows Blue operating system on your own machine. Leaked build 9364 hit file sharing sites earlier today — according to Neowin , the 32-bit edition is available for download as a 2.63GB ISO, and likely hit the web from a Microsoft partner in France. Notable adjustments include larger and smaller Live Tiles, enabling a bit more Start screen customization, along with an updated side-by-side app view, which boosts multitasking efficiency by displaying two applications with matching width. Other additions include a Play option under the Devices panel, a screenshot button on the Share sidebar, and Internet Explorer 11, which comes packaged with the new OS. Windows Blue build 9364 appears to be an unauthorized leak, but even if you have any reservations about installing it on your own machine, you’ll surely be able to check out plenty of eye candy from other users over the hours and days to come. In the meantime, hit up the source links for a few more screenshots. [Thanks, Jim] Filed under: Software , Microsoft Comments Source: Winforum , Neowin

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Leaked Windows Blue build 9364 reveals multiple Live Tile sizes, same-width side-by-side apps

‘Energy Beet’ Power Is Coming To America

Hugh Pickens writes writes “Gosia Wonzniacka reports that farmers in Fresno County, California, supported by university experts and a $5 million state grant, are set to start construction of the nation’s first commercial-scale bio-refinery to turn beets into biofuel with farmers saying the so-called ‘energy beets’ can deliver ethanol yields more than twice those of corn per acre because beets have a higher sugar content per ton than corn. ‘We’re trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to shift our transportation fuels to a lower carbon content,’ says Robert Weisenmiller. ‘The beets have the potential to provide that.’ Europe already has more than a dozen such plants, so the bio-refinery would resurrect a crop that has nearly vanished. The birthplace of the sugar beet industry, California once grew over 330,000 acres of the gnarly root vegetable (PDF), with 11 sugar mills processing the beets but as sugar prices collapsed, the mills shut down. So what’s the difference between sugar beets and energy beets? To produce table sugar, producers are looking for sucrose, sucrose and more sucrose. Energy beets, on the other hand, contain multiple sugars, meaning sucrose as well as glucose, fructose and other minor sugars, called invert sugars. To create energy beet hybrids, plant breeders select for traits such as high sugar yield, not just sucrose production. America’s first commercial energy beet bio-refinery will be capable of producing 40 million gallons of ethanol annually but the bio-refinery will also bring jobs and investment, putting about 80 beet growers and 35,000 acres back into production.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Energy Beet’ Power Is Coming To America

IBM Dipping Chips In ‘Ionic Liquid’ To Save Power

Nerval’s Lobster writes “IBM announced this week that it has developed a way to manufacture both logic and memory that relies on a small drop of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip oxides back and forth between an insulating and conductive state without the need to constantly draw power. In theory, that means both memory and logic built using those techniques could dramatically save power. IBM described the advance in the journal Science, and also published a summary of its results to its Website. The central idea is to eliminate as much power as possible as it moves through a semiconductor. IBM’s solution is to use a bit of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip the state. IBM researchers applied a positively charged ionic liquid electrolyte to an insulating oxide material — vanadium dioxide — and successfully converted the material to a metallic state. The material held its metallic state until a negatively charged ionic liquid electrolyte was applied in order to convert it back to its original, insulating state. A loose analogy would be to compare IBM’s technology to the sort of electronic ink used in the black-and-white versions of the Kindle and other e-readers. There, an electrical charge can be applied to the tiny microcapsules that contain the ‘ink,’ hiding or displaying them to render a page of text. Like IBM’s solution, the e-ink doesn’t require a constant charge; power only needs to be applied to re-render or ‘flip’ the page. In any event, IBM’s technique could conceivably be applied to both mobile devices as well as power-hungry data centers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IBM Dipping Chips In ‘Ionic Liquid’ To Save Power

Skype’s IP-leaking security bug creates denial-of-service cottage industry

It’s been more than a year since the WSJ reported that Skype leaks its users’ IP addresses and locations. Microsoft has done nothing to fix this since, and as Brian Krebs reports, the past year has seen the rise of several tools that let you figure out someone’s IP address by searching for him on Skype, then automate launching denial-of-service attacks on that person’s home. In the above screen shot, we can see one such service being used to display the IP address most recently used by the Skype account “mailen_support” (this particular account belongs to the tech support contact for Mailien, a Russian pharmacy spam affiliate program by the same name). Typically, these Skype resolvers are offered in tandem with “booter” or “stresser” services, online attack tools-for-hire than can be rented to launch denial-of-service attacks (one of these services was used in an attack on this Web site, and on that of Ars Technica last week). The idea being that if you want to knock someone offline but you don’t know their Internet address, you can simply search on Skype to see if they have an account. The resolvers work regardless of any privacy settings the target user may have selected within the Skype program’s configuration panel. Beyond exposing one’s Internet connection to annoying and disruptive attacks, this vulnerability could allow stalkers or corporate rivals to track the movement of individuals and executives as they travel between cities and states. Privacy 101: Skype Leaks Your Location

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Skype’s IP-leaking security bug creates denial-of-service cottage industry

A 50 Gbps Connection With Multipath TCP

First time accepted submitter Olivier Bonaventure writes “The TCP protocol is closely coupled with the underlying IP protocol. Once a TCP connection has been established through one IP address, the other packets of the connection must be sent from this address. This makes mobility and load balancing difficult. Multipath TCP is a new extension that solves these old problems by decoupling TCP from the underlying IP. A Multipath TCP connection can send packets over several interfaces/addresses simultaneously while remaining backward compatible with existing TCP applications. Multipath TCP has several use cases, including smartphones that can use both WiFi and 3G, or servers that can pool multiple high-speed interfaces. Christoph Paasch, Gregory Detal and their colleagues who develop the implementation of Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel have achieved 50 Gbps for a single TCP connection [note: link has source code and technical details] by pooling together six 10 Gbps interfaces.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A 50 Gbps Connection With Multipath TCP

Tracking the Web Trackers

itwbennett writes “Do you know what data the 1300+ tracking companies have on you? Privacy blogger Dan Tynan didn’t until he had had enough of being stalked by grandpa-friendly Jitterbug phone ads. Tracking company BlueKai and its partners had compiled 471 separate pieces of data on him. Some surprisingly accurate, some not (hence the Jitterbug ad). But what’s worse is that opting out of tracking is surprisingly hard. On the Network Advertising Initiative Opt Out Page you can ask the 98 member companies listed there to stop tracking you and on Evidon’s Global Opt Out page you can give some 200 more the boot — but that’s only about 300 companies out of 1300. And even if they all comply with your opt-out request, it doesn’t mean that they’ll stop collecting data on you, only that they’ll stop serving you targeted ads.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tracking the Web Trackers