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Valve releases tool to test whether your PC is VR ready

(credit: Valve ) With HTC beginning to take pre-orders for the SteamVR-powered Vive headset in just one week, you may well be wondering if your PC tower is up for running high-end VR without any distracting lag. Worry not: Valve has just released a SteamVR Performance Test Tool to determine whether you are technologically ready to shell out $799 for an HTC Vive . Unlike Oculus’ own Rift Compatibility Tool , which just seems to check your PC parts against a list without actually running a diagnostic, Valve’s tool takes a few minutes to run through a small, non-interactive animation of a GLaDOS robot repair facility. The goal is to “determine whether your system is capable of running VR content at 90fps and whether VR content can tune the visual fidelity up to the recommended level,” according to a Valve blog post . Afterwards, the tool gives an average fidelity rating (on a numerical and Low/Medium/High/Very High scale). It also tells you what percentage of tested frames dipped below the recommended 90 fps for a smooth VR experience and whether any of those frames were bound by the CPU, rather than the GPU. The tool does warn that “the varying CPU cost of positional tracking and processing-intensive applications” could mean actual software runs worse than the test would suggest and warns that it doesn’t test for available USB slots either. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Valve releases tool to test whether your PC is VR ready

LG jumps on the VR bandwagon with the LG 360 VR

Jennifer Hahn The LG 360 VR. I can see the future! 6 more images in gallery LG’s biggest announcement today is undoubtedly the LG G5 , but next to the company’s flagship smartphone, it was also demoing this crazy VR headset called the “LG 360 VR.” It requires a smartphone to work, but unlike Galaxy Gear-style headsets that require you to slot the phone into the headset, this headset is just tethered to the LG G5 via a USB cable. The device is basically an external display for the G5, allowing the headset to have a slimmer profile while cutting the weight down to only 118g. LG isn’t offering many specifics about the display inside the headset, only saying it has a resolution of 639 ppi. LG also isn’t saying much in the way of pricing, a launch date, or even capabilities, but it does mention that it “is compatible with 360-degree images as well as all Google Cardboard content.” We were able to briefly check out prototype hardware at LG’s G5 event, and we can say the big, face-engulfing VR headsets are that size for a reason—namely blocking out the light in the room. This was more like wearing a pair of opaque eyeglasses; allowing light to gush in from the top and bottom of the device. For the most part, the headset didn’t work yet, but it did briefly mirror the G5’s home screen when we plugged in the USB cable. The display area is about what you would expect from looking at the outside of the device. It’s a long, thin screen the fills maybe half your vertical vision. It won’t be a device for immersion, but LG says it will “simulate a 130-inch TV viewed from two meters.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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LG jumps on the VR bandwagon with the LG 360 VR

California parents: file this form to keep your kids’ school records private

There’s a hard-fought lawsuit underway about whether California schools failed in their duty to provide special ed to students, and as a part of that, the court has ordered disclosure of the school records of every California so the plaintiffs can analyze them. (more…)

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California parents: file this form to keep your kids’ school records private

Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip

(credit: Drexel University ) Since the tech boom began decades ago, we’ve seen a dramatic transformation of electronics. Today, some technological dreamers are talking about “smart environments” where electronics are seamlessly integrated into our environment, providing comfort and convenience. For these dreams to be achieved, we need to get electronics—not just the chips—miniaturized to the point where sensors can be pervasive. This involves developing high-performance electrochemical storage devices to enable long-lived sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. But efficient miniaturized energy storage devices have proven to be challenging to create; it can be done, but it’s hard to integrate the results with other electronics. Supercapacitors According to an article in Science , an international team of scientists has now reported some progress in this area—specifically with the design of micro-supercapacitors. Supercapacitors are a class of materials that can store energy through accumulation of charge at the surface of a high-surface-area carbon sheet. They typically have a good cycle life, moderate energy density (6 Wh/kg), and high power densities (> 10 kW/kg). Supercapacitors are a great replacement for batteries in applications that require high power delivery and uptake with a very long charge-discharge cycle life; micro-supercapacitors are the same kind of material but much, much smaller. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip

California’s Bullet Train Will Now Start In the Bay Area—Which Might Save It

Organizers for California’s high-speed train just announced that when their bullet train opens, it’ll start service out of the Bay Area, not Southern California like originally planned. Read more…

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California’s Bullet Train Will Now Start In the Bay Area—Which Might Save It

McAfee will break iPhone crypto for FBI in 3 weeks or eat shoe on live TV

Enlarge / John McAfee and Ars Technica deep cover operative Sean Gallagher at an unnamed location that looks suspiciously like Las Vegas. (credit: Sean Gallagher) In an op-ed for Business Insider titled ” I’ll decrypt the San Bernardino phone free of charge so Apple doesn’t need to place a back door on its product ,” libertarian presidential candidate and former antivirus developer John McAfee waded into the ongoing battle of words between Apple and the FBI with some choice words of his own. Never one to bring a knife to a verbal gunfight, McAfee unleashes a howitzer of invective, blasting the United States government for undermining the country’s “already ancient cybersecurity and cyberdefense systems.” It takes only four short paragraphs for McAfee to start talking about Nazis and Hitler. Two paragraphs later—not counting blockquotes—McAfee proclaims that by pressing Apple to “back door” (his words) the iPhone and bypass or defeat the mechanisms keeping its data secure, the government is seeking to bring about the end of the world (as we know it). This is heavy stuff. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Chrome OS distro for regular PCs can now dual-boot with Windows

Enlarge / Dell’s old Latitude E6410 becomes a modern Chromebook. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) A few months ago, we wrote about CloudReady , a version of the open source Chromium OS from Neverware that can transform older Windows PCs into what are essentially Chromebooks (give or take a couple of media codecs and other features). Neverware takes the Chromium OS code provided by Google and does all the hard work of testing and maintaining driver compatibility and providing updates, the same things that Google handles for actual Chromebooks. The OS is aimed at schools that either want to move to Chromebooks but can’t afford the cost of all-new hardware or schools that have already begun a transition to Chromebooks but want to repurpose old hardware they already have. Today, Neverware announced a new version of CloudReady aimed at schools and individuals who want to try the software on their PCs without losing the capability to run Windows. CloudReady version 45.3 can be installed on any system with an existing UEFI-mode installation of Windows 7, 8, or 10 and 32GB of free disk space. You can find detailed installation directions on Neverware’s site. The UEFI requirement means that the list of PCs that support dual-booting is much shorter than the normal CloudReady support list, so this won’t be of much use to people with older BIOS-based PCs and Windows installations. But if you happen to have a device on the list, and you want to give the software a spin, you can download the free version from Neverware’s site. The fully featured version that supports Google’s Chrome OS management console costs $59 per machine for an unlimited license or $25 for a one-year license. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Chrome OS distro for regular PCs can now dual-boot with Windows

Massive US-planned cyberattack against Iran went well beyond Stuxnet

(credit: Aurich Lawson) The Stuxnet computer worm that destroyed centrifuges inside Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site was only one element of a much larger US-prepared cyberattack plan that targeted Iran’s air defenses, communications systems, and key parts of its power grid, according to articles published Tuesday. The contingency plan, known internally as Nitro Zeus, was intended to be carried out in the event that diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear development program failed and the US was pulled into a war between Iran and Israel, according to an article published by The New York Times . At its height, planning for the program involved thousands of US military and intelligence personnel, tens of millions of dollars in expenditures, and the placing of electronic implants in Iranian computer networks to ensure the operation targeting critical infrastructure would work at a moment’s notice. Another piece of the plan involved using a computer worm to destroy computer systems at the Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which was built deep inside a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom. It had long been considered one of the hardest Iranian targets to disable and was intended to be a follow-up to “Olympic Games,” the code name of the plan Stuxnet fell under. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Massive US-planned cyberattack against Iran went well beyond Stuxnet

This flower, preserved in amber, may be 45 million years old

George Poinar The new fossil flower Strychnos electri in its original Dominican amber piece of mid-Tertiary age. The whole flower is less than 20 mm long and is the first finding of an asterid flower in amber from the New World. 4 more images in gallery This delicate flower has been preserved in amber, with each petal and tiny hair intact, for as many as 45 million years. Scientists discovered the flower in a cave in the Dominican Republic along with a treasure trove of insects preserved in amber. Now the flower has been identified by an expert as a member of the vast Asterid clade of flowers, whose members include the coffee plant as well as potatoes, peppers, and the poisonous Strychnine tree. Amber is fossilized tree sap, and pinning an exact date on it is extremely difficult. In paper published this morning in Nature Plants , biologists George Poinar and Lena Struwe carefully used two methods of dating the material to suggest that this flower might have been fossilized as early as 45 million years ago or as late as 15 million. They came up with such a broad spread of dates largely because we still don’t have very many fossils from these kinds of plants, which makes precise dates difficult. The researchers had to date the flower by proxy, by examining other life forms found the amber cache, including the common single-celled organisms known as foraminifera and coccoliths. There are distinct evolutionary and population changes in foraminifera and coccoliths over time, and paleontologists often use these tiny animals to place fossils during specific geological periods. What’s certain is that this flower bloomed long before the age of apes during the mid-Tertiary period. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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This flower, preserved in amber, may be 45 million years old

Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

(credit: Netflix) Netflix has been moving huge portions of its streaming operation to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for years now, and it says it has finally completed its giant shift to the cloud. “We are happy to report that in early January of 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service,” Netflix said in a blog post that it plans to publish at noon Eastern today. (The blog should go up at this link .) Netflix operates “many tens of thousands of servers and many tens of petabytes of storage” in the Amazon cloud, Netflix VP of cloud and platform engineering Yury Izrailevsky told Ars in an interview. Netflix had earlier planned to complete the shift by the end of last summer . Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud

Ken May

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