Tag: business

HP to issue “optional firmware update” allowing 3rd-party ink

An HP Officejet ink cartridge, just $26.99. (credit: HP ) HP Inc. today said it will restore the ability of certain OfficeJet printers to use third-party ink cartridges, after being criticized for issuing a firmware update that rejects non-HP ink. But HP is still defending its practice of preventing the use of non-HP ink and is making no promises about refraining from future software updates that force customers to use only official ink cartridges. HP made its announcement in a blog post titled ” Dedicated to the best printing experience .” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HP to issue “optional firmware update” allowing 3rd-party ink

Hubble finds additional evidence of water vapor plumes on Europa

Enlarge / Scenario for getting water to Europa’s surface. Artist’s conception of ridges and fractures on Europa. (credit: Caltech/NASA) In the seminal science fiction series Space Odyssey , novelist Arthur C. Clarke called attention to the Jovian moon Europa’s special place in the Solar System. At the end of the series’ second novel, 2010: Odyssey Two , a spaceship sent to the Jupiter system receives a message from aliens: “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” In data released publicly Monday NASA didn’t get quite such a declarative message from the intriguing moon, but the new information is nonetheless thrilling. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what are likely water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. If the plumes do, in fact, emerge and rain down on the surface, it will be significantly easier for scientists to study the moon’s interior ocean. “E uropa is a world of great interest,”  Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said during a news conference Monday. Monday’s news is significant because it comes as NASA is taking formative steps toward launching a pair missions to Europa in the 2020s—an orbiter to scout the moon, and a lander that will follow a couple of years later. The same engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who masterminded Curiosity’s landing on Mars have turned their attention toward how best to land a probe on Europa’s icy surface. And it is no easy feat. The moon creaks as Jupiter’s gravitation bulk rends its frozen surface in deep crevasses, pushing and pulling the ice upward and downward by tens of meters every few days. And with only a very tenuous atmosphere, it is cold: -210 degrees Celsius. The radiation from nearby Jupiter would kill a human in a matter of hours or days. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hubble finds additional evidence of water vapor plumes on Europa

Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

Ars visits The Coalition in Vancouver, BC. Video shot by Sam Machkovech, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link) VANCOUVER, BC—The future of high-end PC gaming is looking good thanks to graphics APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan , which let game engines more directly access multi-threaded processes in your hungry gaming computer’s CPU and GPU. As of right now, however, neither API has been heavily tested in the public gaming market. Vulkan’s biggest splashes to date have included noticeable, if incremental, bumps for games like Dota 2 and this year’s Doom reboot, while DX12 has been applied to PC versions of existing Xbox One games—meaning that we’ve seen those games jump up to impressive 4K resolutions, but we haven’t seen similar jumps in geometry or other major effects. This fall, Microsoft is finally taking the DX12 plunge with a deluge of ” Xbox Play Anywhere ” game launches, including this week’s Forza Horizon 3 , but arguably the biggest DX12er of the bunch is October’s Gears of War 4 . I wouldn’t have made that statement before game developer The Coalition unveiled the game’s DirectX 12 version for the first time, but after seeing what the company had to offer, I was amazed. Here, finally, was a Gears of War game that looked as stunning as the original did during its era—you know, so long as you can afford the game’s “recommended” PC build spec. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

GM Commits To 100% Renewable Energy By 2050

We’ve seen a number of entities announce plans to operate with 100% renewable energy over the years. Costa Rica, for example, has gone 76 straight days using 100% renewable electricity. General Motors is the latest company to release a roadmap to achieving 100% renewable energy. The catch? It won’t be until 2050. CleanTechnica reports: American multinational General Motors, or GM, has committed to generating or sourcing 100% of the electricity for its operations across 59 countries from 100% renewable energy by 2050. GM made the announcement on Wednesday, revealing that it planned to generate or source all its electrical power needs for its 350 operations in 59 countries with 100% renewable energy such as wind, solar, and landfill gas, by 2050. In turn, the company has joined the 100% renewable energy campaign RE100, lending its considerable global business weight to an already important and successful campaign. “Establishing a 100% renewable energy goal helps us better serve society by reducing environmental impact, ” said Mary Barra, GM Chairman and CEO. “This pursuit of renewable energy benefits our customers and communities through cleaner air while strengthening our business through lower and more stable energy costs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GM Commits To 100% Renewable Energy By 2050

After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

Hello, old friend Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30 th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+. Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don’t even support lower-case characters. You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There’s also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

YouTube Gets Its Own Social Network With Launch of YouTube Community

The earlier reports were right when they said YouTube was working on launching its own social networking service for content creators. Instead of the “YouTube Backstage” branding, YouTube has decided to call their social networking service “YouTube Community, ” which allows content creators to use text, GIFs, and images to better engage viewers. Given the controversy surrounding YouTube in regard to demonetizing videos that are not deemed “friendly to advertisers, ” many YouTube creators have been or are thinking about leaving the site and joining competing services. These new tools are designed to help keep creators from departing to competing platforms. TechCrunch reports: YouTube has been testing the new service over the past several months with a handful of creators in order to gain feedback. It’s launching the service into public beta with this group of early testers, and will make it available to a wider group of creators in the “month’s ahead, ” it says. Access to this expanded feature set is made available to the creators and their viewers by way of a new “Community” tab on their channels. From here, creators can share things like text posts, images, GIFs and other content, which the audience can thumbs up and down, like the videos themselves, as well as comment on. Viewers will see these posts in their “Subscriptions” feed in the YouTube mobile application, and can also choose to receive push notifications on these posts from their favorite creators, YouTube says.” Only time will tell whether or not this new move will be better received than YouTube’s Google+ integration… Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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YouTube Gets Its Own Social Network With Launch of YouTube Community

Amazon Prime gives you Audible streams for free

Amazon Prime members get a pretty decent bunch of benefits for their $99 a year subscription, and the list of goodies just got a bit longer. The online retail giant now offers its subscribers free access to Audible Channels , a collection of talk show-type streams and audiobooks that would normally cost $5 a month. Prime members can download the Audible app for iOS, Android and Windows 10 to access Channels, which will include ad-free programming and content from The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , Charlie Rose , Harvard Business Review and The Onion , among others. It’ll also include 20 curated playlists around comedy, meditation and news, as well as a rotating selection of more than 50 audiobooks. In addition to free two-day shipping and now, free Audible content, a Prime subscription also gets you free access to Amazon’s video streaming service , a ton of ebooks, photo storage, early entry to certain deals and a somewhat limited selection of music. But the company could be boosting its library of songs , and that, together with the Audible offering, could really enhance the amount and quality of its content. Source: BusinessWire

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Amazon Prime gives you Audible streams for free

HP To Buy Samsung’s Printer Business For $1.05 Billion

HP has agreed to a deal with Samsung to acquire their printer business for $1.05 billion, a deal that will be the largest print acquisition in HP’s history. USA Today reports: “The acquisition of Samsung’s printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers, ” said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement. The Samsung deal would give HP access to 6, 500 printing patents as well as 1, 300 researchers and engineers “with advanced expertise in laser printer technology.” While this deal is being negotiated, Samsung’s mobile phone business has been navigating a recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones over issues with batteries catching fire and exploding. One of the most recent accidents reported involved a six-year-old boy in New York, who was using the device when it “suddenly burst into flames.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HP To Buy Samsung’s Printer Business For $1.05 Billion

Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

The SENA UD100 Bluetooth adapter, plus a slightly larger antenna, allows Blue Hydra to peer deep into the Bluetooth world. Sean Gallagher My new neighbor was using AirDrop to move some files from his phone to his iMac. I hadn’t introduced myself yet, but I already knew his name. Meanwhile, someone with a Pebble watch was walking past, and someone named “Johnny B” was idling at the stoplight at the corner in their Volkswagen Beetle, following directions from their Garmin Nuvi. Another person was using an Apple Pencil with their iPad at a nearby shop. And someone just turned on their Samsung smart television. I knew all this because each person advertised their presence wirelessly, either over “classic” Bluetooth or the newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) protocol—and I was running an open source tool called Blue Hydra , a project from the team at Pwnie Express . Blue Hydra is intended to give security professionals a way of tracking the presence of traditional Bluetooth, BTLE devices, and BTLE “iBeacon” proximity sensors. But it can also be connected to other tools to provide alerts on the presence of particular devices. Despite their “Low Energy” moniker, BTLE devices are constantly polling the world even while in “sleep” mode. And while they use randomized media access control (MAC) addresses, they advertise other data that is unique to each device, including a universally unique identifier (UUID). As a result, if you can tie a specific UUID to a device by other means, you can track the device and its owner. By using the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), you can get a sense of how far away they are. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

Confirmed: Mysterious ancient Maya book, Grolier Codex, is genuine

A page from the Grolier Codex, now confirmed by an international team of scholars to be the oldest bound book found in the Americas. In a rare reversal, archaeologists have determined that a Maya book written almost 900 years ago is genuine–after decades of believing it was fake. The Grolier Codex was so named because it was first displayed in 1971 at the book lovers’ Grolier Club in New York City. Archaeologist Michael Coe, who arranged the 1971 showing, later described its rather questionable history in a book . It was acquired in a spectacularly scammy way in 1966 by a Mexican collector named Josué Sáenz. Coe says that Sáenz told him that a group of unknown men offered to sell the book to him, along with a few other items found “in a dry cave” near the foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas. They would only sell it if Sáenz agreed never to tell anyone or show the book. The collector, intrigued, took a plane to a remote airstrip with two experts, who declared the codex fake. But Sáenz went with his gut and bought the codex. After allowing Coe to display it in New York, he gave it to the Mexican government. There were a number of good reasons to believe the Grolier Codex was fake–beyond the sketchy way Sáenz procured it. Unlike three other Maya Codex finds, it had writing on only one side of each of its 10 pages. Plus, some of the pages appear to have been cut relatively recently. There are odd discrepancies in the book’s calendar system, hinting that a forger might have been trying to imitate a calendar he saw in another Maya artifact. The drawings are also unusual for a Maya document, combining styles of the Mesoamerican Mixtec people with Toltec attire. The Toltec were often hailed by the Aztecs as ancestors, and their art shares many similarities with late Maya art. Though carbon dating placed the Codex’s bark pages during the late Maya period, it was not unknown for looters to find blank pages in ancient Maya caches and cover them in fake hieroglyphs to make them more valuable. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Confirmed: Mysterious ancient Maya book, Grolier Codex, is genuine