digest-golf – Page 36

What we know (and suspect) is coming in iOS 8.1

Apple Pay is one of the biggest features expected to launch with iOS 8.1 later this month. Apple Last week, numerous publications ( including Ars ) reported seeing references to iOS 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 in their site analytics pages. iOS versions 5, 6, and 7 only saw one major point update apiece during their respective lifespans, so evidence of three different updates being tested simultaneously just weeks after the release of iOS 8.0 came as a surprise. It looks like we’ll be seeing the first of those updates sooner rather than later. Today Apple pushed out the second beta build of iOS 8.1 in as many weeks to its registered developers, and the final version of the software is rumored to be released at or near Apple’s event later this month . Obviously such a quick turnaround time will make iOS 8.1 a smaller update than iOS 7.1 , which gestated for around six months and fixed a host of problems when finally released. But the update is still rumored to include a handful of significant features—here’s a list of the most important additions. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What we know (and suspect) is coming in iOS 8.1

Borked Belkin routers leave many unable to get online

Owners of Belkin routers around the world are finding themselves unable to get online today. Outages appear to be affecting many different models of Belkin router, and they’re hitting customers on any ISP, with Time Warner Cable and Comcast among those affected. ISPs, inundated with support calls by unhappy users, are directing complaints to Belkin’s support line, which appears to have gone into meltdown in response. The reason for the massive outages is currently unknown. Initial speculation was that Belkin pushed a buggy firmware update overnight, but on a reddit thread about the problem, even users who claim to have disabled automatic updates have found their Internet connectivity disrupted. Others suggest that there is some kind of DNS problem at work. Although the routers are correctly picking up their DNS settings from DHCP, they’re apparently unable to resolve domain names correctly. Connecting to the Internet using IP addresses alone does, in fact, appear to work, but with most of us dependent on DNS, this is of little value. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Borked Belkin routers leave many unable to get online

Soylent gets a version bump to 1.1—new flavor, new gut flora help

A single week of Soylent contains seven meal pouches and seven oil containers. Total weight is just about 10 lbs (4.5 kg). Lee Hutchinson Soylent, the slushy slightly sweet meal supplement/replacement from California engineer Rob Rhinehart and his company Rosa Labs, has by most accounts been a smashing success story. We tried it and liked it a year ago. While we wrote more about why folks might (or might not) want to drink it once it hit its official release , the Rosa Labs development team has continued work even as shipments of the powder leave the factory by the truckload. In an update e-mail yesterday morning, Rosa Labs announced two major milestones: first, that shipments have (finally) been completed to everyone who backed the Soylent crowdfunding project prior to its closure, and secondly, that Soylent is getting its first major update to version 1.1. It seems a little weird that food (or “food”) has a version number, but Rhinehart always intended Soylent to be a product that changed over time based on feedback and market forces. In a quick post on the official Soylent blog, Rhinehart explains that the bump to 1.1 brings with it a decrease in the product’s sucralose level, dialing down the release version’s vague sweetness to a more truly neutral taste. The logic here, explains the post, is that it’s easier to add sweetness than to take it away, and many Soylent 1.0 users have expressed a desire to flavor the product with add-ons (peanut butter is a popular one, as is blended fruit). The second change deals with my biggest issue with Soylent—what can be politely termed as “a bit of gas.” Regular Soylent use eliminates the gas, but using Soylent as an occasional substitute for a missed meal—which is my preferred usage of the stuff—can introduce some thunderous gut activity (which I referred to in my original Soylent review as ” horse-killing farts “). Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Soylent gets a version bump to 1.1—new flavor, new gut flora help

Blue LEDs given Nobel Prize in physics

Nobel Prize Committee Each year, roughly a quarter of the electricity we generate goes to lighting. For decades, that lighting came in the form of an incandescent light bulb, which produced 16 lumens for every Watt it was fed. Fluorescent bulbs are roughly five times as efficient, but recent LEDs do nearly 19 times better than incandescents, producing 300 lumens for each Watt. The first LEDs date back to 1907, but it’s only recently that their incredible efficiency has been brought to bear on the lighting market. One of the key holdups was our inability to generate a broad spectrum of colors. Specifically, we couldn’t make white light because we lacked the ability to produce blue LEDs. Now, the Nobel Prize in Physics is being given to three materials scientists who overcame this roadblock. The people receiving the honor are Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, both faculty at Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura, now of UC Santa Barbara, who did much of his key work while at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Japan. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

At 650% interest, that online payday loan is a steal

Fraud and Abuse Online: Harmful Practices of Inernet Payday Lending Online payday loan operators threaten their customers, promote loans designed for long-term indebtedness, and charge exorbitant interest rates, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Lump-sum loans online typically cost $25 per $100 borrowed per pay period—an approximately 650 percent annual percentage rate,” Pew said . The report, ” Fraud and Abuse Online: Harmful Practices in Internet Payday Lending ,” (PDF) comes a month after the Federal Trade Commission halted an only payday scheme that the government said “allegedly bilked consumers out of tens of millions of dollars by trapping them into loans they never authorized and then using the supposed ‘loans’ as a pretext to take money from their bank accounts .” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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At 650% interest, that online payday loan is a steal

References to iOS 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 showing up in site analytics

iOS 8 development continues apace. Andrew Cunningham iOS 8 has been in the hands of the public for about a week and a half , and the OS has already received a pair of minor updates. One fixed a handful of small issues in the initial release; another fixed the major bugs introduced in the first update. But we’re already seeing evidence that Apple is working on some larger updates to the operating system, namely versions 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3. 9to5Mac first pointed out evidence of these new iOS versions this morning, found in its own analytics and data from some of its sources. So we quickly looked into our traffic data for September for similar data. We found requests listing iOS 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 coming from Apple IP addresses—several thousand from 8.1 and just a few hundred from 8.2 and 8.3, which makes sense given that 8.1 is probably being worked on more aggressively at this point. The news here is not that Apple is continuing to develop new versions of iOS but that releasing an iOS 8.2 or 8.3 update would be a break from recent tradition. The last iOS version to progress beyond x.1 was iOS 4, which came during a much busier period for Apple in general and iOS specifically. Version 4.1 fixed many of the glaring bugs in version 4.0 and helped boost speed on the iPhone 3G, version 4.2 unified the iPhone and iPad versions of the OS and ushered in the first non-AT&T iPhones, and version 4.3 was introduced alongside the iPad 2. To some degree, software version numbers are arbitrary, but releasing three “major” updates for iOS 8 could indicate that iOS 8’s lifecycle will be similarly busy. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Samsung loves “big.” Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you’ll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined . We dug through everyone’s 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this: Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo At 275,000 employees, Samsung ( just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung’s machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones and 27 tablets just in 2014. If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple’s headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The “Sony” on this chart only means “Sony Electronics,” the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

iOS 8.0.1 fixes a handful of bugs with the new update. Andrew Cunningham Apple has just released iOS 8.0.1, the first update to the new operating system that reached the public last week . The update is available through iTunes or as an over-the-air update for any device that runs iOS 8—the iPhone 4S or newer, iPad 2 or newer, and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. Though it comes just a week after iOS 8’s release, the 8.0.1 update fixes a wide-ranging list of problems. Apple has fixed the bug that was keeping HealthKit-compatible apps from working, and it corrected a problem where third-party keyboards could be toggled off after entering a passcode. The company also addressed photo library access for third-party apps, “unexpected cellular data usage when receiving SMS/MMS messages,” the Ask To Buy feature of Family Sharing, something keeping ringtones from being restored from iCloud backups, and “a bug that prevented uploading photos and videos from Safari.” Those updates are available for all devices, but the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus get one specific fix that is meant to make the Reachability feature more consistent. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

Reversible, tiny, faster: Hands on with the USB Type-C plug

Megan Geuss SAN FRANCISCO—Last week, Ars met up with several representatives of the non-profit USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) to check out some of the first USB Type-C connectors off the assembly lines. The Type-C specification was announced in December and finalized in August , and it’s set to bring a number of improvements to its predecessors, in addition to being smaller than the Type-A USB plugs we’re familiar with today. Considering how many USB Type-A devices are still being actively built out there (over 4 billion USB-compatible products are made each year), this smaller, reversible connector represents a significant jump. Jeff Ravencraft, President and COO of USB-IF, told Ars that USB-IF wanted a connector that worked equally well for large and small devices. “We also understand that yeah the consumer maybe has some trouble with putting in that cable connector,” he added of the Type-C’s new-found ability to be plugged in right-side up or upside down, like Apple’s Lightning connector. The new Type-C connector is also slightly bigger than its proprietary cousin, with Type-C sized at approximately 8.4mm by 2.6mm and Lightning coming in at 7.7 mm by 1.7 mm. Unlike the reversible Lightning, but similar to USB connectors before it, the USB Type-C connector has a mid-plate inside the receptacle that the plug surrounds when it’s inserted. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reversible, tiny, faster: Hands on with the USB Type-C plug

Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Charles Chan When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, “putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Alibaba’s IPO beat out record IPOs like Visa’s $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors’ $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms). Earlier this month , the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share , as of this writing. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Ken May

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