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AMD’s next desktop chip lands in January, merges CPU and GPU like never before

We’ve been waiting a long time for the AMD chip known as Kaveri , but at least now we have a date for its availability: January 14th. We also know that the flagship desktop part for FM2+ socket motherboards will be called the A10-7850K, that it’ll use four Steamroller CPU cores clocked at 3.7GHz, and that it’ll incorporate the same TrueSound audio processing technology found on AMD’s latest Radeon graphics cards. What we don’t know for sure is how much this A10 chip will cost, or whether it’ll arrive first as a standalone part or in pre-built systems. But either way, we’re about discover something important: namely, whether the next-gen “Heterogeneous Systems Architecture” ( HSA ) that AMD has been boasting about, and which is supported for the first time on Kaveri, is actually worth its syllables. Read on for more. Filed under: Desktops , Gaming , AMD Comments Source: AnandTech

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AMD’s next desktop chip lands in January, merges CPU and GPU like never before

How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”

Aryan Blaauw One Sunday late last month, administrators at Orlando, Florida-based TorGuard were in high spirits. They had just successfully rebuffed the latest in a series of increasingly powerful denial-of-service attacks designed to cripple their virtual private networking service. Despite torrents of junk traffic that reached peaks as high as 15Gbps, the admins had neutralized the offensive by locking down the TorGuard servers and then moving them behind the protective services of anti-DoS service CloudFlare. “This seemed to anger the attackers, however, because on Monday things got a bit more personal,” TorGuard administrator Ben Van Pelt told Ars. “Unable to spam, DDoS, hack, or social engineer us, they employed the tactics of the ‘4chan party van.’ Throughout the day our office received multiple unrequested deliveries from local pizza chains, Chinese food, and one large order of sushi. A handful of local electricians and plumbing services were also disappointed to be turned away. To my knowledge no fake calls have been placed to law enforcement yet, however nothing would surprise me at this point.” The two-month-long campaign of harassment and attacks, which Van Pelt suspects was carried out by a competing virtual private networking service, illustrates the lengths some people will go to goad their online adversaries. His experience provides a vivid account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a relentless stream of distributed denial-of-service attacks and ultimately what can be done to mitigate them. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Linux Kernel Running In JavaScript Emulator With Graphics and Network Support

New submitter warmflatsprite writes “It seems that there have been a rash of JavaScript virtual machines running Linux lately (or maybe I just travel in really weird circles). However until now none of them had network support, so they weren’t too terribly useful. Sebastian Macke’s jor1k project uses asm.js to produce a very fast emulation of the OpenCores OpenRISC processor (or1k) along with a HTML5 canvas framebuffer for graphics support. Recently Ben Burns contributed an emulated OpenCores ethmac ethernet adapter to the project. This sends ethernet frames to a gateway server via websocket where they are switched and/or piped into TAP virtual ethernet adapter. With this you can build whatever kind of network appliance you’d like for the myriad of fast, sandboxed VMs running in your users’ browsers. For the live demo all VMs connect to a single private LAN (subnet 10.5.0.0/16). The websocket gateway also NATs traffic from that LAN out to the open Internet.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The State of ReactOS’s Crazy Open Source Windows Replacement

jeditobe writes with a link to a talk (video recorded, with transcript) about a project we’ve been posting about for years: ambitious Windows-replacement ReactOS: “In this talk, Alex Ionescu, lead kernel developer for the ReactOS project since 2004 (and recently returning after a long hiatus) will talk about the project’s current state, having just passed revision 60000 in the SVN repository. Alex will also cover some of the project’s goals, the development and testing methodology being such a massive undertaking (an open source project to reimplement all of Windows from scratch!), partnership with other open source projects (MinGW, Wine, Haiku, etc…). Alex will talk both about the infrastructure side about running such a massive OS project (but without Linux’s corporate resources), as well as the day-to-day development challenges of a highly distributed team and the lack of Win32 internals knowledge that makes it hard to recruit. Finally, Alex will do a few demos of the OS, try out a few games and applications, Internet access, etc, and of course, show off a few blue screens of death.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How engineers freeze soil to create structurally sound solid walls of earth

In Japan, engineers are attempting to contain radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant by freezing the ground around it into “ice walls” that will remain frozen for years . At Nova, Jessica Morrison writes about this weird technique, which has been around for over half a century and is more commonly used as part of massive construction projects with large underground components, including Boston’s Big Dig.

Chinese Bitcoin Exchange Vanishes, Taking £2.5m of Coins With It

An anonymous reader writes “A Chinese Bitcoin exchange has vanished without trace, taking more than $4 million of the virtual currency with it and leaving profit-hungry investors out of pocket. GBL, the Chinese Bitcoin exchange was launched in May 2013 and putatively based in Hong Kong, despite its servers being registered in Beijing. However GBL’s Hong Kong offices do not exist. GBL mysteriously disappeared in early November taking an estimated $4.1m (£2.6m) of Bitcoins with it.” (Beware the auto-playing ads, with sound.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Latest Gmail update lets you preview and browse full attachments within emails, save files direct to Drive

Google wants to make sure you never have to leave its tidy suite of services and today’s Gmail update goes a long way towards assuring that. Now, previews of file attachments will show up at the bottom of emails and can be expanded to full-size view just by hovering over them with the cursor. That preview state not only lets users browse multi-page documents and search for text, but also presents an option to upload directly to Google Drive , so you can access those files from the cloud on whatever device, wherever you go. The update’s set to roll out “over the next week, ” and is desktop-only for now. But this being Google, you can expect Gmail’s new preview convenience to seep into mobile sooner than later. Filed under: Internet , Software , Google Comments Source: Google Drive Blog

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Latest Gmail update lets you preview and browse full attachments within emails, save files direct to Drive

EVGA Tegra Note 7 review: a gaming tablet with much to offer, much to learn

There’s no shortage of tablets available on the market, but it’s surprisingly difficult to find one that performs well for an affordable price. Aside from the Nexus tablets Google has put out over the past two years, we’ve only seen a few products in the $200 price range deserving of our praise. Now NVIDIA is trying its hand with the Tegra Note 7 , a mid-sized, WiFi-only tablet that comes with a a clever new type of stylus and a powerful Tegra 4 chip promising strong gaming performance. O ur US review unit is dubbed the EVGA Tablet, though it will be sold under different brands in other parts of the world . Read on as we share our experiences of the $200 tablet, which is available for pre-order today and shipping on November 19th. %Gallery-slideshow119690% Filed under: Tablets , Wireless , Google , NVIDIA Comments

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EVGA Tegra Note 7 review: a gaming tablet with much to offer, much to learn

25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last

MrSeb writes with this excerpt, linking to several pretty graphs: “For more than 30 years, the realm of computing has been intrinsically linked to the humble hard drive. It has been a complex and sometimes torturous relationship, but there’s no denying the huge role that hard drives have played in the growth and popularization of PCs, and more recently in the rapid expansion of online and cloud storage. Given our exceedingly heavy reliance on hard drives, it’s very, very weird that one piece of vital information still eludes us: How long does a hard drive last? According to some new data, gathered from 25, 000 hard drives that have been spinning for four years, it turns out that hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Digital Textbook Startup Kno Was Sold For $15 Million

Nate the greatest writes “Intel didn’t mention how much they paid for digital textbook startup Kno when they announced the acquisition last week but inside sources are now saying that the digital textbook startup was picked up for a song. GigaOm reported earlier today that their sources told them that Kno sold effectively for pennies on the dollar: ‘Well placed sources who were in the know told us that the company sold for $15 million with some retention bonuses for the employees. Intel bought the company mostly for its hardware-related intellectual property and the employees. Intel also was one of the largest investors in the company — having pumped in $20 million via its Intel Capital arm.’ Kno had raised $73 million in venture capital since it was founded 4 years ago, and it picked up another $20 million in debt. This deal was nothing less than a fire sale, and that does not bode well for the digital textbook market or other startups in this niche. Inkling, for example, just raised $20 million dollars this summer in order to compete in a market that where one of their competitors failed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Digital Textbook Startup Kno Was Sold For $15 Million

Ken May

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