Author: kenmay

For This Year’s iPhone, Apple Is Ditching Lightning Connector and Home Button, But Embracing USB Type-C and Curved Display

Apple has decided to adopt a flexible display for at least one model of the new iPhone, reports WSJ. From the report: People with direct knowledge of Apple’s production plans said the Cupertino, Calif., company has decided to go ahead with the technology, and it will release a phone model using the OLED screens this year (Editor’s note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). The technology allows manufacturers to bend screens in ways they couldn’t previously — such as by introducing a curve at the edge of the phone as in some Samsung models. However, once the phone is manufactured, the OLED screen can’t be bent or folded by the user, at least with current technology. Using OLED displays would allow Apple to introduce a phone with a new look to fuel sales. They said Apple would introduce other updates including a USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices instead of the company’s original Lightning connector. The models would also do away with a physical home button, they said. Those updates would give the iPhone features already available on other smartphones. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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For This Year’s iPhone, Apple Is Ditching Lightning Connector and Home Button, But Embracing USB Type-C and Curved Display

Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 Computer With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

On the fifth birthday of the original Raspberry Pi, the foundation has announced the Raspberry Pi Zero W, a slightly more capable variant of the miniature computer. From a report on BetaNews: It’s essentially a Pi Zero with the addition of the two features many people have been requesting — wireless LAN and Bluetooth. Priced at $10, the Pi Zero W uses the same Cypress CYW43438 wireless chip as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B to deliver 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. The full list of features is as follows: 1GHz, single-core CPU, 512MB RAM, mini-HDMI port, micro-USB On-The-Go port, micro-USB power, HAT-compatible 40-pin header, composite video and reset headers, CSI camera connector, 11n wireless LAN, and Bluetooth 4.0. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 Computer With Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

Xbox apes Netflix with $10 per month, 100-game unlimited “Pass”

Enlarge / A promotional image shows some of the games you’ll be able to download for one monthly subscription price through Xbox Game Pass. (credit: Xbox Wire ) Borrowing a page from Netflix’s unlimited subscription model, Microsoft today announced Game Pass , a service that will offer downloadable copies of over 100 Xbox One and backwards-compatible Xbox 360 games from the systems’ legacy catalogs for a $10-per-month subscription. Microsoft hasn’t provided a full list of games that will be available yet, but an e-mailed announcement included Halo 5: Guardians, Saints Row IV Re-Elected, NBA 2K16, Mad Max, LEGO Batman, Mega Man Legacy Collection, Terraria, Payday 2, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Fable III, SoulCalibur II and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 as examples of what to expect at launch. Publishers taking part in the program include 2K, 505 Games, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Codemasters, Deep Silver, Focus Home Interactive, Sega, SNK, THQ Nordic GmbH, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and Microsoft Studios. New games will cycle in and out of availability with some regularity, Microsoft said. Still, based on the above list, we wouldn’t expect any major new releases to hit Game Pass until well after their traditional retail launches. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xbox apes Netflix with $10 per month, 100-game unlimited “Pass”

Amazon cloud sputters for hours, and a boatload of websites go offline

Enlarge (credit: Amazon) When the Amazon infrastructure-as-a-service cloud goes down, Internet users are going to notice. Amazon Web Services, which powers a whole bunch of websites and online services, has been struggling today, and numerous sites that rely on Amazon infrastructure have gone offline as a result. Appropriately enough, ” Is It Down Right Now? ,” a site that tells you whether other sites are down, has been struggling to stay online. Other apparent victims include The AV Club , Trello, Quora, IFTTT, Open Whisper Systems , and websites created with Wix . Oh the irony! https://t.co/UlVux2PETS is down now too. #aws #s3 — Gillian Owen (@gilliancowen) February 28, 2017 Amazon itself was initially having trouble providing updates to its service health site. But the company posted this note at 2:35pm ET: “We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard…. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon cloud sputters for hours, and a boatload of websites go offline

One billion hours of YouTube are watched every day

It’s easy to track YouTube’s most popular metric: Check the counter below any video to see how many times it’s been played. It’s harder to know how long viewers watch, which YouTube staff started tracking years ago. Today, those stats passed an auspicious number: Over a billion hours of content are watched every day by users around the globe. YouTube’s post presents some factoids grappling with that milestone: Watching a billion hours yourself would take over 100, 000 years, say. Since more than half of views come from mobile, a good chunk of those billion hours watched per day are seen on devices. And an increasing number of those might be watched without sound given that the total number of auto-captioned videos tipped past the one billion mark two weeks ago. As the dominant video platform, this daily total will only go up, especially now that YouTube is starting to roll out mobile live streaming. Whether it’s movie trailers, music videos, cooking shows, user-created fiction series, gaming channels, week-by-week recounting of World War One’s events on this date a century ago, or whatever other weird thing you’re into…well, I guess we’re all watching a billion hours of it tomorrow. Source: YouTube Blog

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One billion hours of YouTube are watched every day

Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors

Less than a week after AMD announced the first line up of Ryzen processors, Intel is apparently fighting back by dropping the price of several of its processors. Rob Williams, writing for HotHardware: So, what we’re seeing now are a bunch of Intel processors dropping in price, perhaps as a bit of a preemptive strike against AMD’s chips shipping later this week — though admittedly it’s still a bit too early to tell. Over at Amazon, the prices have been slower to fall, but we’d highly recommend that you keep an eye on the following pages, if you are looking for a good deal this week. So far, at Micro Center we’ve seen the beefy six-core Intel Core i7-6850K (3.60GHz) drop from $700 to $550, and the i7-6800K (3.40GHz) drop down to $360, from $500. Also, some mid-range chips are receiving price cuts as well. Those include the i7-6700K, a 4.0GHz chip dropping from $400 to $260, and the i7-6600K, a 3.50GHz quad-core part dropping from $270 to $180. Even Intel’s latest and greatest Kaby Lake-based i7-7700K has experienced a drop, from $380 to $299, with places like Amazon and NewEgg retailing for $349. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors

Professors Claim Passive Cooling Breakthrough Via Plastic Film

What if you could cool buildings without using electricity? charlesj68 brings word of “the development of a plastic film by two professors at the University of Colorado in Boulder that provides a passive cooling effect.” The film contains embedded glass beads that absorb and emit infrared in a wavelength that is not blocked by the atmosphere. Combining this with half-silvering to keep the sun from being the source of infrared absorption on the part of the beads, and you have a way of pumping heat at a claimed rate of 93 watts per square meter. The film is cheap to produce — about 50 cents per square meter — and could create indoor temperatures of 68 degrees when it’s 98.6 outside. “All the work is done by the huge temperature difference, about 290C, between the surface of the Earth and that of outer space, ” reports The Economist. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Professors Claim Passive Cooling Breakthrough Via Plastic Film

Fasting Diet ‘Regenerates Diabetic Pancreas’

According to a new study published in the journal Cell, a certain type of fasting diet can trigger the pancreas to regenerate itself. Of course, the researchers advise people not to try this without medical advice. BBC reports: In the experiments, mice were put on a modified form of the “fasting-mimicking diet.” It is like the human form of the diet when people spend five days on a low calorie, low protein, low carbohydrate but high unsaturated-fat diet. It resembles a vegan diet with nuts and soups, but with around 800 to 1, 100 calories a day. Then they have 25 days eating what they want — so overall it mimics periods of feast and famine. Previous research has suggested it can slow the pace of aging. But animal experiments showed the diet regenerated a special type of cell in the pancreas called a beta cell. These are the cells that detect sugar in the blood and release the hormone insulin if it gets too high. There were benefits in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes in the mouse experiments. Type 1 is caused by the immune system destroying beta cells and type 2 is largely caused by lifestyle and the body no longer responding to insulin. Further tests on tissue samples from people with type 1 diabetes produced similar effects. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fasting Diet ‘Regenerates Diabetic Pancreas’