After a long drought, California is suddenly getting pounded with its biggest storm in a decade. Whoa, what’s happening? It’s all the work of an atmospheric river, a particular weather event that can be devastating when it hits land. Read more…
See more here:
The Meteorological Phenomenon That’s Flooding California
An anonymous reader writes This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases featuring: a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. You can get it here and the list of changes are here. Existing 9.2.x users and 9.3 beta testers are encouraged to upgrade. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
FreeNAS 9.3 Released
Kinsa, the company behind the world’s first app-enabled, FDA-approved smart thermometer, has today announced the close of a $9.6 million Series A financing round with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, FirstMark Capital, and Andy Palmer, among others. This comes directly on the heels of the launch of a new program called Fluency, which lets Kinsa track the spread… Read More
See the original article here:
Kinsa Raises $9.6M Series A For A Smart Thermometer That Tracks The Spread Of Illness
Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner Microsoft Even as it has cut the price of Windows— offering it for free on phones and small screen tablets, plus there’s a Bing edition for everything else—Microsoft is still working on ways to monetize its platform. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner was speaking to investors last week, and GeekWire reported that profits are still the goal. Asked if the plan was to make Windows a loss leader to draw people into the Microsoft ecosystem, Turner said that the company had “not had any conversations” on this. He reiterated this when asked if the company was going to start losing money on Windows, saying “that’s not any conversations that we’ve had… we’ve got to monetize it differently.” What form might that different monetization take? Turner says that “there are services involved. There are additional opportunities for us to bring additional services to the product and do it in a creative way.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
See original article:
Microsoft makes a nod to subscriptions for Windows 10
Faster charging, like Qualcomm’s “Quick Charge 2.0” (branded as “Turbo Charging” on the Nexus 6), is one of the nicest new smartphone features available. If we can’t make a battery last all day with heavy use, we can at least make it charge faster. The faster charging is possible because these devices charge at a higher voltage—instead of the normal 5 watts from a standard USB charger, these hit about 14 watts. These faster chargers have left wireless chargers in the dust, though. Today’s Qi charging pads still only put out 5W, the same as a slow wired charger. Freescale Semiconductor, a company that provides various chips to OEMs, is out to fix that. Today the company announced integrated circuits for 15 watt wireless chargers —a wireless solution that should be just as fast as a hardwired turbo charger. Of course, you will need new hardware to make this work. Freescale’s solution will require a new chip in your smartphone or tablet and a new charging pad. The good news is that this isn’t a new standard. Freescale’s chips can be tweaked to be compliant with Qi charging, which is found in many smartphone, or with lesser-used standards like the Power Matters Alliance. The Qi “medium power” standard is actually good up to 120W, provided the pad and device support it. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read the original post:
New wireless charging gear promises 3x faster charging
Things have advanced quite a bit since our last thoroughly in-depth look at how solid state disks work, and Samsung has been one of the biggest companies leading the charge toward faster, denser solid state drives. Its 840 EVO was the first consumer SSD to use TLC NAND—that’s triple-level cell NAND, which can store three bits per memory cell instead of one or two. Now, Samsung’s newest consumer SSD takes NAND density a step further, stacking the memory cells on top of each other in a complex sandwich. The 850 EVO, formally announced this morning , uses 32-layer TLC “V-NAND,” where the “V” stands for “vertical.” As we discussed previously at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung is the only SSD manufacturer that makes ” the whole widget “—it’s the only vertically integrated OEM that builds every part of the SSDs it sells, including the NAND that actually holds the data. This gives the company a distinct advantage over other SSD manufacturers—most of whom source their NAND from Samsung. The 850 EVO is set to be released in four capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. These are all decimal measurements, not binary—so that “1TB” is properly one trillion bytes, not 1024GB (there are official IEC units for binary measurements, but I’ll eat glass before I start saying ” tebibyte “). The quoted numbers on Samsung’s site look pretty good for a consumer-level drive: max sequential read speeds of 540MB/s, max sequential write speeds of 520MB/s, and relatively high IOPS across a variety of read and write regimes. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read More:
Samsung 850 EVO SSD takes its storage into the third dimension
Onetime Apple supply manager Paul Shin Devine will spend a year in prison and repay $4.5 million for selling Apple’s secrets to suppliers, the AP reports . Devine, who worked at Apple from 2005 until his arrest in August of 2010 , pleaded guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering—and could have been sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison. Working with Singapore resident Andrew Ang, Devine was accused of selling confidential information to companies that hoped to become Apple suppliers, and to suppliers trying to negotiate better deals with the company. Winning an Apple contract can be a make-or-break moment for a supplier, as we saw in the recent dust-up between Apple and would-be sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies ; companies hoping to get in on the action sent “millions in kickbacks” to Devine. Ang and Chua Kim Guan, who were respectively the sales director and general manager of Jin Li Mould Manufacturing, were charged in 2013 for bribing Devine. They were accused of paying Devine $387,600 between 2006 and 2009. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
Continue reading here:
Apple manager gets year in jail, $4.5m fine for selling industry secrets
On Friday Digital Einstein went live, bringing with it a treasure trove of Einstein letters, correspondences, postcards, and notes detailing the life of one of the world’s greatest thinkers. As The New York Times reports , these are The Dead Sea Scrolls of physics and you can read them today for free. Read more…
Link:
Tons of Albert Einstein Documents Are Now Online for Free
During a court hearing in Oakland, California, it’s come to light that, between 2007 and 2009, Apple deleted tracks downloaded from rival music services off of iPods. Read more…
See more here:
Apple Deleted Competitors’ Songs From Your iPod
The idea of putting body-worn cameras on police officers has spread since protests and unrest following the shooting of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. Earlier this week, the Obama administration proposed federal funding to get 50,000 more officers equipped with the cameras. The increased use of cameras makes a few policy questions around them more pressing. One such question: what happens when a police officer fails—or straight-up refuses—to turn on the body camera? The issue was highlighted in today’s Wall Street Journal , which features a story about a New Mexico police officer who “was fired for allegedly not following an order to record and upload all contacts with citizens,” according to the Albuquerque Police Department and the officer’s lawyer. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Continue reading here:
Police officer fired for refusing to turn on body cam