digest-golf – Page 14 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Enlarge / Apple’s sample universal binary here is just 60 percent of its original size when downloaded to an iPad or iPhone. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Back in June, we wrote a bit about App Thinning , a collection of iOS 9 features that are supposed to make iOS 9 apps take up less space on iDevices. Apple has just announced to developers that one of those features, “app slicing,” is not available in current iOS 9 versions due to an iCloud bug. It will be re-enabled in a future iOS update after the bug has been resolved. App slicing ensures that your iDevice only downloads the app assets it needs to work. In older versions of iOS, all devices downloaded “universal” versions of apps that included all of the assets those apps needed to work on each and every targeted iDevice. If you downloaded an app to your iPhone 5, for example, it could include larger image assets made for the larger-screened iPhones 6 and 6 Plus, 64-bit code that its 32-bit processor couldn’t use, and Metal graphics code that its GPU didn’t support. That’s all wasted space, a problem app slicing was designed to resolve. Apple says the iCloud bug affects users who are restoring backups to new devices—if you moved from that iPhone 5 to a new iPhone 6S, for example, iCloud would restore iPhone 5-compatible versions of some apps without the assets required by the newer, larger device. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Simulation of the pair of supermassive black hole binary system, PG 1302-102. The smaller shines more brightly because it’s farther from the center of mass, and thus closer to the outer disk of gas. This gas accretes onto the black hole, heating up as it falls in, and thus emits more light. The more massive black hole, therefore, is starved of gas and doesn’t glow as brightly. (credit: Zoltan Haiman, Columbia University ) Data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer ( GALEX ) and the Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the presence of a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other so closely that they’re moving at relativistic speeds—a significant fraction of the speed of light. Supermassive black holes are expected to come in pairs pretty often. That’s because every galaxy has its own supermassive black hole, and galaxies often merge, bringing the two together. These mergers are very slow processes that distort both galaxies until their stars settle into new orbits (a process known as “violent relaxation”). While this is happening, extremely heavy objects, such as supermassive black holes, will tend to move in toward the center of the new galaxy. The new galaxy would end up with two supermassive black holes, one from each original galaxy, orbiting each other at its core. Objects have been observed which look a lot like supermassive black hole binaries, matching the prediction. These objects have a lot of mass—billions of times the mass of the Sun, as we’d expect from a pair of supermassives—and they’re periodic, meaning the amount of light the object produces rises and falls with a predictable time period. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Supermassive black holes found spiraling in at seven percent light speed

Finally, game cartridges you can plug in to your smart phone

Downloading games directly to your smartphone and playing them immediately is convenient, I suppose. But this ephemeral, bloodless process is missing a familiar tangibility gamers might remember warmly from the last millennium: that comforting, solid, life-affirming feeling of jamming a game cartridge into a console slot. Enter Pico Cassette , a Japanese outfit that says it’s bringing back “the next retro” with tiny game cartridges that plug in to a smartphone’s headphone jack. The tiny “cassettes” (the general Japanese term for cartridges) are built on PlugAir technology , which uses a specially designed iPhone or Android app to draw power from the headphone jack and send data using specially modulated sound waves. Those coded sound waves are then used to unlock access to content that’s stored in the cloud, according to a PlugAir explanation video . That would seem to remove one of the main conveniences of the physical cartridge format—namely, distributing and storing data permanently without an Internet connection—but there’s nothing technical preventing the actual game data from being stored on the cartridges as well. In any case, there’s something about the simplicity of being able to share a game with a friend simply by handing them a physical thing that plugs in to the phone (though the need for a special app is a bit of an impediment to immediate ad-hoc sharing). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

The songwriter who co-wrote Megan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” alleged on Tuesday that he only cleared $5,679 from over 178 million streams of the song on Spotify. (credit: YouTube ) A Tuesday copyright roundtable discussion, hosted by Nashville’s Belmont University and led by the House Judiciary Committee, opened with one of the past year’s most successful songwriters announcing just how little money he’d made from over 178 million streams of a song he co-wrote: $5,679. That means Nashville songwriter Kevin Kadine, the co-writer of the hit 2014 Megan Trainor song “All About That Bass,” made close to $31.90 for every million streams. According to a report by The Tenneseean , Kadine didn’t clarify to the roundtable’s five members of the House of Representatives exactly how the songwriting proceeds were split between himself and Trainor (who shared songwriting credits on “Bass”), but he did allege that the average streaming-service payout for a song’s songwriting team is roughly $90 per million streams. “That’s as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career, and number one in 78 countries,” Kadine said. “But you’re making $5,600. How do you feed your family?” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Songwriter tells US House he made $5,679 from 178 million Spotify streams

Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

(credit: From court records in Good Morning to You v. Warner/Chappell) More than two years after a documentary filmmaker challenged the copyright to the simple lyrics of the song “Happy Birthday,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the copyright is invalid . The result could undo Warner/Chappell’s lucrative licensing business around the song, once estimated to be $2 million per year. The company is likely to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. US District Judge George King held that the two sisters who authored the song, Patty and Mildred Hill, gave the melody and piano arrangements to Summy Co., which was eventually acquired by Warner/Chappell. But King wrote that there’s no evidence they ever transferred a copyright on the words. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Documentarian wipes out Warner’s $2M “Happy Birthday” copyright

Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Online backup provider Backblaze is branching out today with a new business: an infrastructure-as-a-service-style cloud storage API that’s going head to head with Amazon’s S3, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud Storage. But where those services charge 2¢ or more per gigabyte per month, Backblaze is pricing its service at just half a cent per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s business is cheap storage. We’ve written about the company’s hard disk reliability data a few times over the years ; the company has found that regular consumer hard drives are more than up to the demands of providing cloud storage, though there is substantial variation between the different manufacturers and models. Backblaze has designed (and documented ) its storage hardware for the lowest possible cost, using software to provide the necessary protection against failures. It currently has more than 150 petabytes of storage. This low-cost storage means that the company can offer its $5/month unlimited size backup plan profitably. Now the company plans to sell that same cheap storage to developers. Its new B2 product is very much in the same vein as Amazon’s S3: cloud storage with an API that can be used to build a range of other applications. And the price difference is significant. Amazon S3’s cheapest online storage—reduced redundancy, for customers storing more than 5 petabytes—costs 2.2¢ per gigabyte per month. Backblaze’s B2 storage costs 0.5¢ per gigabyte per month, with the first 10GB free. This is cheaper even than Amazon’s Glacier and Google’s Nearline storage, at 1¢ per gigabyte per month, neither of which supports immediate access to data. Bandwidth costs are the same; inbound bandwidth is free, outbound is charged at 5¢ per gigabyte. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Backblaze to sell cloud storage for a quarter the price of Azure, Amazon S3

Samsung’s 950 Pro M.2 SSD pairs NVMe with V-NAND for eye-popping performance

The Samsung 950 Pro SSD—the follow up to the legendary Samsung 850 Pro SSD—has been unveiled by the company at its annual SSD summit in Seoul, Korea. The 950 Pro will be available at retail in October, with MSRPs of $199.99 (probably ~£150) for the 256GB version, and $349.99 (~£280) for the 512GB version. UK pricing is yet to be confirmed. Based on Samsung’s V-NAND technology and available in 512GB and 256GB capacities, the 950 Pro shuns the common 2.5-inch form factor and SATA interface for cutting-edge M.2 2280 and PCIe 3.0 x4. It also makes use of the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface, better known as NVMe. Most SSDs still make use of the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, which was originally developed for spinning platter SATA hard drives back in 2004. While AHCI works fine for traditional hard drives, it was never designed for low latency NAND chips. As flash speeds have increased, AHCI has become a performance bottleneck. NVMe exploits both the PCIe bus and NAND flash memory to offer higher performance and lower latency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam

A few months after Valve officially launched Steam for Linux in 2013, Gabe Newell gave his LinuxCon keynote crowd a bit of music for their ears. “It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming,” the Valve head-man said. “It’s sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.” Linux gaming was by no means a new endeavor, but 2013 stands as a major year for the open-source platform’s gaming prospects with Valve announcing Linux-based Steam Machines and the arrival of SteamOS . When we looked at the state of Linux gaming after its 12-month Valve anniversary, we found nearly 1,000 professional, commercially distributed games available as of February 2015. But this weekend there’s an even bigger numeric milestone to celebrate according to the Linux site Phoronix —1,500 Linux titles are currently available through Steam. Phoronix notes Steam has been adding roughly 100 Linux titles per month throughout the summer. And while the total number of Steam Linux offerings still pales in comparison to competing platforms—Phoronix cites Windows at 6,464 games and OS X at 2,323—the statistical growth in such a short period of time is undeniable. Anecdotal evidence supporting Steam’s Linux gaming growth looks rosy as well. The five most popular Linux titles for Steam include major developer offerings like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordo r (the rest of the top five according to Phoronix includes ARK: Survival Evolved , Team Fortress 2 , and Dota 2). And this summer, a small indie game called Don’t Be Patchman even became the first Linux-exclusive launch on Steam. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Some men wearing Google Glass. Glass Collective The Google Glass team is still alive inside of Google. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the group has a new name, “Project Aura,” and has recently picked up a few engineers from Amazon. That’s “Project Aura,” not to be confused with ” Project Ara ,” another struggling group inside Google that’s trying to build a modular smartphone. “Project Aura” seems to still have all of the previous Google Glass management in place. Ivy Ross, former chief marketing officer of Art.com, is still leading the project. She still reports to Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest. This group is all part of Google Glass’ “reboot” team. They’re charged with taking the original version of Google’s face-mounted computer and turning it into something appealing; we’ve yet to see a product from this revamped group. According to the report, the group has been hiring engineers, software developers, and project managers from Amazon’s Lab126, a hardware division that was most recently responsible for the Amazon Fire Phone. After the Fire Phone flopped, Amazon fired “dozens” from the Lab126 group, and Google swooped in to pick up some new employees. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Getting companies’ names to show up higher in search engine results is the field of the lucrative business known as search engine optimization, or SEO. There’s a range of SEO practices, from “white hat” ones that are endorsed by search engines, to “black hat” practices that, while they may not be illegal, violate search engine rules. Now Google is taking a rare legal action against one Southern California SEO company it says went too far and broke the law. In its complaint (PDF) , Google says that Tustin, California-based Local Lighthouse has bombarded consumers with “incessant, unsolicited automated telephone calls” since mid-2014, making “false guarantees of first-page placement in Google search results.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”