A Fully Loaded Mac Pro Could Cost You $14,000

The cheapest Mac Pro you can buy, Apple informed us last week , will cost you $3, 000. That’s a pretty penny, sure, but not outrageous for a workstation these days. What if, though, you spec it out as far as you can go? That’s when we hit new car territory. Read more…        

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A Fully Loaded Mac Pro Could Cost You $14,000

LG G Flex announced with vertically-curved 6-inch 720p screen, ‘self-repairing’ back cover

LG’s unveiled all the details for its often-leaked , curved screen smartphone. Weighing in at 177g with a 6-inch (but 720p) display, it’s powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM, with a 13-megapixel camera housed between two rear control buttons, which is now an LG thing. In comparison to Samsung’s Galaxy Round , the screen on the G Flex arcs from top to bottom, not side-to-side, which at least makes a little more sense to us, hopefully fitting in better to the curvature of the users’ face. We’re yet to handle either curved phone IRL just yet, however, when we’ll be able to offer up a better perspective on how both devices actually feel. Like LG’s recent G2 , there’s high-fidelity audio recording and playback, dual-window app functionality and tap-to-wake on that substantial touchscreen. There’s also special animations, depending on where and how you unlock the phone. The Korean press release is also reporting that there’s a self-healing coating that can repair hairline scratches on the rear of the phone. LG says they are repaired “within minutes.” Korean smartphones with the power to control the elements are, however, still TBC. The G Flex will arrive on Korea’s three major carriers next month — but (again) there’s no word on global roll-out, hinting that the smartphone could well be a test model for the company. We’ve added the confusingly Google-translated release after the break. Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , LG Comments Via: The Verge Source: Newswire

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LG G Flex announced with vertically-curved 6-inch 720p screen, ‘self-repairing’ back cover

Seagate introduces a new drive interface: Ethernet

It’s not time to say goodbye to the old storage network quite yet, but a new combination of cloud, networking, and storage technology might mark the beginning of the end for SANs—Seagate has introduced a new storage architecture that puts Ethernet directly on the disk drive. Called the Kinetic Open Storage Platform, the new approach turns disks themselves into servers, delivering data over the network to applications using an open application interface. The Kinetic platform is a combination of an open programming interface and intelligence and a network interface installed in the storage device itself. It’s targeted mostly at companies looking to adopt the same sort of architecture in their data centers that they use to connect to cloud storage providers such as Amazon. While the architectural approach Seagate is taking is an evolution of work already done by cloud giants such as Google and Facebook, it turns cloud-style storage into a commodity. And that could change how companies small and large think of networked storage—especially as they move toward using newer software development approaches to build their applications or move applications built on Amazon or other cloud services back within their firewalls. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Seagate introduces a new drive interface: Ethernet

Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?

This is the first of two pieces we’re publishing on the all-electric Tesla Model S. The other is a video that documents our journey from Houston to Austin and back in the car, and it can be viewed right here . My videographer Steve uttered a single strained curse as inertia’s invisible hand pushed us back into the leather with enough force to knock the camera mount out of alignment. The Tesla’s acceleration was instant, ludicrous, neck-snapping—more appropriate for a roller-coaster than a car. The camera’s point of view was now skewed sideways from this morning’s careful alignment, but Steve didn’t reach for it because we had just gone from 70 miles per hour to north of 100, and we were still going strong. I should have slowed down, because I-10 out west of Houston is the natural habitat of humorless state troopers, but I didn’t. The breathtakingly flat torque curve of the Model S begs to be explored. The pedal under my right foot was just pure magic . No shifting of gears or howling engine here—the only sound was the ever-increasing rush of air as we hurtled toward the car’s 130 mph limiter. And as we accelerated, my prejudices about electric cars were forcibly rearranged. Read 104 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?

AMD’s Radeon R9 290X Review

Billly Gates writes “AMD may have trouble in their CPU department with Intel having superior fabrication plants. However, in the graphics market with GPU chips AMD is doing well. AMD earned a very rare Elite reward from Tomshardware as the fastest GPU available with its fastest r9 for as little as $550 each. NVidia has its top end GPU cards going for $1, 000 as it had little competition to worry about. Maximum PC also included some benchmarks and crowned ATI as the fastest and best value card available. AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD’s Radeon R9 290X Review

Spooks throw Obama under the bus: He knew about Merkel spying since 2010

An anonymous “US intelligence source” told a German newspaper that Obama had been briefed on the fact that the NSA had tapped German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone in 2010, and that he’d personally let it go. Expect a lot more of this, as spooks who are sick of being kicked around for conducting the spying that high-ranking administration officials had been delighted to green-light start to whisper the names of their collaborators in government. Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying that National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010. “Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,” the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying. News weekly Der Spiegel reported that leaked NSA documents showed that Merkel’s phone had appeared on a list of spying targets since 2002, and was still under surveillance shortly before Obama visited Berlin in June. Obama aware of Merkel spying since 2010: German media [Deborah Cole/AFP] ( via /. )        

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Spooks throw Obama under the bus: He knew about Merkel spying since 2010

Mac OS 10.9’s Mail App — Infinity Times Your Spam

An anonymous reader writes “Email service FastMail.fm has an blog post about an interesting bug they’re dealing with related to the new Mail.app in Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks. After finding a user who had 71 messages in his Junk Mail folder that were somehow responsible for over a million entries in the index file, they decided to investigate. ‘This morning I checked again, there were nearly a million messages again, so I enabled telemetry on the account … [Mail.app] copying all the email from the Junk Folder back into the Junk Folder again!. This is legal IMAP, so our server proceeds to create a new copy of each message in the folder. It then expunges the old copies of the messages, but it’s happening so often that the current UID on that folder is up to over 3 million. It was just over 2 million a few days ago when I first emailed the user to alert them to the situation, so it’s grown by another million since. The only way I can think this escaped QA was that they used a server which (like gmail) automatically suppresses duplicates for all their testing, because this is a massively bad problem.’ The actual emails added up to about 2MB of actual disk usage, but the bug generated an additional 2GB of data on top of that.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mac OS 10.9’s Mail App — Infinity Times Your Spam

Climb Your Family Tree With These Online Genealogy Tools

The questions of who we are and where we came from can often be answered, not by looking inward, but by looking backward. While nature and nurture certainly play the primary roles in our development as individuals, it’s only through the study of one’s ancestry that we develop a more complete view of ourselves as how we fit into the larger scope of human history. Luckily, tracing one’s roots is easier than ever thanks to the Internet. Read more…        

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Climb Your Family Tree With These Online Genealogy Tools

Ancient LaserDisc is a treasure trove of unreleased Star Wars footage

They say you can’t put a price on happiness, but we bet the Star Wars fan(s) who bought this LaserDisc off eBay didn’t mind paying $699 for 30 minutes of bliss. After all, it contains 50 raw and behind-the-scene takes from Return of the Jedi , which the public has never seen before. Back in the day, Lucasfilm used LaserDiscs to save material due for processing on its proprietary EditDroid software, a precursor to modern-day systems like Final Cut Pro . The good news is that whoever it was that shelled out the money belongs to the light side of the Force and has chosen to share their good fortune. They’re posting the disc’s content bit by bit on a Facebook page , and right now, there are five videos you can watch to make the weekend better. Seeing as copyright issues might arise along the way, though, don’t be surprised if the clips disappear faster than Yoda’s body. Filed under: Misc , Alt Comments Via: CNET Source: ROTJEditDroid

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Ancient LaserDisc is a treasure trove of unreleased Star Wars footage

Jeffrey Zients Appointed To Fix Healthcare.gov

An anonymous reader writes with news that the Obama administration has appointed Jeffrey Zients to lead the effort to revamp Healthcare.gov after its trouble rollout earlier this month. Zients said, “By the end of November, healthcare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users.” Obama created a position for Zients within the government in 2009, when he was made the OMB’s Chief Performance Officer. The purpose of his position was to analyze and streamline the government’s budget concerns. “Healthcare.gov covers people in the 36 states that declined to run their own health-insurance exchanges. About 700, 000 applications have been begun nationwide, and half of them have come in through the website. The White House aims to have 7M uninsured Americans covered by the scheme by the end of March.” Zients’s appointment came after a contentious House Committee hearing about the healthcare website, in which many were blamed and few took responsibility. The government also said that contractor Quality Software Services Inc., a subsidiary of UnitedHealth group, would “oversee the entire operation” of Healthcare.gov. QSSI has already done work on the website, building the pipeline that transfers data between the insurance exchanges and the federal agencies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jeffrey Zients Appointed To Fix Healthcare.gov