Tag: brides-cond

CES tells CNET: You’re fired!

At the 2013 CES convention, CNET’s editorial staff loved the Dish Hopper DVR and nominated it “Best in Show.” That journalistic decision was quickly tossed out, however, by the legal department at CBS, CNET’s corporate parent. CBS is involved in litigation against Dish over the Hopper. The censoring of CNET’s decision has produced a fair bit of fallout for CBS already. The company has been criticized in many quarters for silencing its journalists. Greg Sandoval, a well-known writer for CNET, even left the company, saying he was concerned that his employer didn’t respect editorial independence. Now, CES itself has put out a press release slamming CNET’s behavior and announcing that CNET won’t be allowed to produce the “Best of CES” awards anymore. Those awards are produced by CNET under contract with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which puts on CES. CEA said it will work to identify a new partner to run the Best of CES awards. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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CES tells CNET: You’re fired!

Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Office 365 Home Premium Edition’s lineup of software, ready to stream to your PC today. Today, Microsoft releases Office 2013—the first full release of Microsoft’s latest-generation productivity suite for consumers. Office 2013 has already made a partial debut on Microsoft’s Windows RT tablets, though RT users will get a (slight) refresh with the full availability of the suite. The company gave consumers an open preview of Office last summer, which we reviewed in depth at the time of the suite’s announcement. So there aren’t any real surprises in the final versions of the applications being releasing today, at least as far as how they look and work. Today’s release, however, marks the first general availability of Microsoft’s new subscription model under the Office 365 brand the company has used for its hosted mail and collaboration services for businesses. While the applications in Office are being offered in a number of ways, Microsoft is trying hard to steer consumer customers to Office 365 Home Premium Edition, a service-based version of the suite that will sell for $100 a year. And just as Windows 8’s app store started to fill up as the operating system approached release, the same is true of Office’s own app store—an in-app accessible collection of Web-powered functionality add-ons for many of the core Office applications based on the same core technologies (JavaScript and HTML5) that power many of Windows 8’s interface-formerly-known-as-Metro apps. Now, the trick is getting consumers to buy into the idea of Office as a subscription service and embracing Microsoft’s Office “lifestyle,” instead of something they buy once and hold onto until their computers end up in the e-waste pile. Read 28 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium Edition hopes to be at your service

Starved brains kill memory-making to survive

“Thanks for the memories, but I’d prefer a bite to eat.” UFL.edu As the organ responsible for maintaining equilibrium in the body and the most energy-demanding of all the organs, the brain takes a lot of the body’s energy allocation. So when food is in short supply, the brain is the organ that is fed first. But what happens when there isn’t enough food to fulfill the high-energy needs of the brain and survival is threatened? The brain does not simply self-allocate available resources on the fly; instead it “trims the fat” by turning off entire processes that are too costly. Researchers from CNRS in Paris created a true case of do-or-die, starving flies to the point where they must choose between switching off costly memory formation or dying. When flies are starved, their brains will block the formation of aversive long-term memories, which depend on costly protein synthesis and require repetitive learning. But that doesn’t mean all long-term memories are shut down. Appetitive long-term memories, which can be formed after a single training, are enhanced during a food shortage. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Starved brains kill memory-making to survive

Cisco to sell Linksys to Belkin, will exit home networking market

Belkin has struck a deal to buy Linksys from Cisco, bringing Cisco’s 10-year dalliance with the consumer networking market closer to an end. Cisco’s Linksys division sells routers and wireless access points to consumers, which is in line with Cisco’s overall focus on networking gear but diverges from the company’s core focus on selling to big businesses rather than home users. Cisco has been gradually stepping out of the consumer business—for example, by killing off the Flip camera line and  Umi home videoconferencing . Cisco recently engaged Barclays to help sell off the home networking division. Belkin’s purchase of Linksys is expected to close in March 2013, but the companies did not reveal the purchase price. Cisco bought Linksys in 2003 for $500 million. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cisco to sell Linksys to Belkin, will exit home networking market

MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

The general approach to storing a binary file as DNA, described in detail below. Goldman et al., Nature It’s easy to get excited about the idea of encoding information in single molecules, which seems to be the ultimate end of the miniaturization that has been driving the electronics industry. But it’s also easy to forget that we’ve been beaten there—by a few billion years. The chemical information present in biomolecules was critical to the origin of life and probably dates back to whatever interesting chemical reactions preceded it. It’s only within the past few decades, however, that humans have learned to speak DNA. Even then, it took a while to develop the technology needed to synthesize and determine the sequence of large populations of molecules. But we’re there now, and people have started experimenting with putting binary data in biological form. Now, a new study has confirmed the flexibility of the approach by encoding everything from an MP3 to the decoding algorithm into fragments of DNA. The cost analysis done by the authors suggest that the technology may soon be suitable for decade-scale storage, provided current trends continue. Trinary encoding Computer data is in binary, while each location in a DNA molecule can hold any one of four bases (A, T, C, and G). Rather than using all that extra information capacity, however, the authors used it to avoid a technical problem. Stretches of a single type of base (say, TTTTT) are often not sequenced properly by current techniques—in fact, this was the biggest source of errors in the previous DNA data storage effort. So for this new encoding, they used one of the bases to break up long runs of any of the other three. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

This metamaterial is the aperture of the new microwave imaging device. John Hunt Add image compression to the list of nifty applications for metamaterials. Metamaterials guide light waves to create “ invisibility cloaks ” and bend sound waves to make theoretical noise reduction systems for urban areas. But these materials are tuned to particular wavelengths; some invisibility cloaks don’t work at all visible wavelengths because they leak those wavelengths of light. Now researchers have capitalized on that leakiness to build a new functional device: a microwave imaging system that compresses an image as it’s being collected—not afterward as our digital cameras do. Every pixel in a picture from our digital cameras corresponds to a pixel of information recorded on the detector inside the camera. Once a camera collects all the light intensity information from a scene, it promptly discards some of it and compresses the data into a JPEG file (unless you explicitly tell it to save raw data). You still end up with a decent picture, though, because most of the discarded data was redundant. Compressive sensing aims to ease this process by reducing the amount of data collected in the first place. One way to do this is with a single pixel camera , developed in 2006. These devices capture information from random patterns of pixels around the image, essentially adding the light intensity values of several pixels together. If you know something about the structure of that image—say clusters of bright stars set against a dark sky—you’ll be able to capture that image with fewer measurements than a traditional camera. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor

FCC adds spectrum to Wi-Fi—but you likely need a new router to use it

Jason Alley The Federal Communications Commission last week said it will add 195MHz of spectrum to Wi-Fi’s 5GHz band. This move is designed to relieve congestion in Wi-Fi networks, particularly in areas of widespread simultaneous usage like airports and sports stadiums . It could help your home network too, but not right away—routers available in stores today may not be able to use the new spectrum at all . Finding out definitively whether today’s routers will support the new spectrum is difficult, partly because the FCC still has to issue specific rules governing its use. We’ve hit up router vendors and other industry people to find out whether software updates might let current routers access the new spectrum. While the results were a bit muddled, it seems safe to say no one is guaranteeing today’s routers will get the benefit of the new 195MHz. Even the latest routers supporting the ultra-modern 802.11ac standard may be left behind. Cisco refused to comment at all, telling us only “Cisco has not made any announcements about this so cannot discuss at this time.” Buffalo told us “the chip vendors will need to work on it” and that “they will at least to have to make changes to the hardware driver. … The magnitude of that change will determine if Buffalo is able to use the same hardware.” Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FCC adds spectrum to Wi-Fi—but you likely need a new router to use it

Microsoft releases emergency update to patch Internet Explorer bug

Microsoft has released an emergency update to patch a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is being exploited in attacks aimed at government contractors and other targeted organizations. The patch fixes a “use after free” bug in versions 6, 7, and 8 of the Microsoft browser and will be automatically installed on affected machines that have automatic updating enabled, Dustin Childs, the Group Manager of the company’s Trustworthy Computing program wrote in a blog post published Monday . The unscheduled release comes just six days after Microsoft’s most recent monthly Patch Tuesday batch of security updates, but it was pushed out to counter an experienced gang of hackers who have infected websites frequented by government contractors to exploit the vulnerability. Monday’s update came hours after Oracle released an unscheduled patch to fix a critical vulnerability in its Java software framework. As Ars reported last week , the zero-day Java exploits were added to a variety of exploit kits that criminals use to turn compromised websites into platforms for silently installing keyloggers and other malware on the machines of unsuspecting visitors. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft releases emergency update to patch Internet Explorer bug

Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

Wilocity’s wireless chips allow 4.6Gbps transmission over the 60GHz band. Wilocity In a quiet suite removed from the insanity of the Consumer Electronics Show expo floor, a company aiming to build the fastest Wi-Fi chips in the world demonstrated its vision of wireless technology’s future. On one desk, a laptop powered a two-monitor setup without any wires. At another, a tablet playing an accelerometer-based racing game mirrors its screen in high definition to another monitor. Across the room, a computer quickly transfers a 3GB file from a wireless router with built-in storage. The suite was set up in the Las Vegas Hotel by Wilocity , a chip company specializing in wireless products using 60GHz transmissions, which are far faster than traditional Wi-Fi. Avoiding the show floor is a good idea if you’re worried about Internet connectivity, because thousands of vendors are clogging the pipes. But that’s not why Wilocity was here—they’d be able to perform the demo even in the busiest parts of CES without interference because they’re not relying on the congested bands used by regular Wi-Fi. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use

Amazon AutoRip: How the labels held back progress for 14 years

Michael Robertson Gabe Lawrence When Michael Robertson heard news of AutoRip , the new Amazon service that automatically adds high-quality MP3s to Cloud Player when you buy a CD, he must have had a sense of deja vu. After all, the entrepreneur introduced a similar service way back in 1999. Unfortunately, it wasn’t licensed by the recording industry, and they sued it out of existence. He tried again with a licensed service in 2007, but only one label would cut a deal and the company failed to gain traction. In a Friday interview with Ars Technica, Robertson told us that the major labels’ decision to license AutoRip represents a sea change in their attitudes toward cloud music services. Until the last couple of years, the labels were relentlessly hostile to the idea that consumers should have the freedom to store DRM-free music online. But a series of business failures and legal defeats forced the labels to face reality. And so fourteen years after Robertson first floated the concept, consumers finally have the freedom to instantly get an MP3 when they buy a CD online. Robertson’s first company, MP3.com was one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley when it launched what we would now call a cloud music service, My.MP3.com, in 1999. The service included a feature called “Beam-It” that allowed users to instantly stock their online lockers with music from their personal CD collections. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon AutoRip: How the labels held back progress for 14 years