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iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pre-orders break record, top 4 million in one day

The iPhone 5S (left) next to the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. Which size is the one for you? Megan Geuss On Monday, Apple confirmed that its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus pre-order numbers broke records for the smartphone line, as they combined to rack up over four million purchases in the first 24 hours they were on sale. As we reported —and Apple’s announcement confirmed—many of those pre-orders won’t ship to customers until October. The pre-orders, which started early Friday morning in nine nations , handily surpassed the first-day numbers of the iPhone 5; that model received over two million pre-orders in 2012 , though its actual first-weekend sales upon retail launch reached five million . That doesn’t mean Apple’s first-week in-store supply will be able to feed the sort of demand that the iPhone 6 is generating. Anybody curled up in a sleeping bag in front of an Apple Store right now, however, can take comfort in the fact that Apple will make “additional supply” of both models available to purchase at 8am local time this coming Friday. All four major American carriers’ stores will also have phones available on Friday, as well as “additional carriers and select Apple Authorized Resellers.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pre-orders break record, top 4 million in one day

US gov’t threatened Yahoo with $250K daily fine if it didn’t use PRISM

Yahoo reports that it is on the verge of releasing 1,500 pages of documents related to a long court battle over its participation in the PRISM program, a National Security Agency program revealed last summer as part of the Snowden leaks. A leaked top-secret slide about PRISM shows that Yahoo was one of the first participants, having begun contributing to the database in March of 2008. It did so under severe duress. Company executives believed the government’s demand for data was “unconstitutional and overbroad” and fought it in court. “Our challenge, and a later appeal in the case, did not succeed,” explained Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell in a blog post published today. “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)… ordered us to give the U.S. Government the user data it sought in the matter.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US gov’t threatened Yahoo with $250K daily fine if it didn’t use PRISM

OneDrive finally gets file sharing as easy as Dropbox

We reported last week that Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service was finally syncing files larger than 2GB. The company today confirmed the change, and disclosed what the new size limit is: 10GB. Not quite enough for a Blu-Ray, but it should solve the file size problem for most users. That’s not the only improvement that Microsoft has made. The desktop client will, at long last, make it easy to share files in OneDrive with other people; right clicking the file in Explorer will have a straightforward “Share a OneDrive link” menu item to create a link that can be e-mailed, tweeted, or otherwise passed around. The lack of such a feature has long made using OneDrive much more annoying than using the competing Dropbox service. The new menu item is rolling out to OneDrive users on Windows 7 and Windows 8 over the next few weeks. The client for Windows 8.1 and OS X will be updated at some time after that. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OneDrive finally gets file sharing as easy as Dropbox

Intel demos next-next-gen “Skylake” processors, coming in late 2015

A Core M CPU package based on the Broadwell architecture. Intel Intel’s Broadwell CPU architecture has only just started rolling out , and most of the processors that use it aren’t even supposed to launch until early next year. The new 14nm manufacturing process is causing the delay , but yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum the company tried to demonstrate that Broadwell’s lateness wouldn’t affect the rest of its roadmap. To that end, Intel highlighted a couple of working developer systems based on the new “Skylake” architecture, as summarized here by Anandtech . The company didn’t go into specific performance or power consumption numbers (both because it’s early and because Intel probably doesn’t want to take the wind out of Broadwell’s sails), but it showed working silicon rendering 3D games and playing back 4K video to prove that the chips are working. The first Skylake processors are reportedly due out late in 2015 following the beginning of volume production in the second half of the year. Here are the basic facts we already know about Skylake: it’s a “tock” on Intel’s roadmap, meaning it introduces a new architecture on a manufacturing process that’s already up and running. In this case, that’s Intel’s 14nm process, which Intel insists has recovered from its early problems . Some of the CPUs in Intel’s lineup—specifically mid-to-low-end socketed desktop CPUs —will get their next refresh using Skylake instead of Broadwell. Whether this is because Intel wants to reserve 14nm manufacturing capacity for lower-power, higher-margin chips or because it just doesn’t think the power-consumption-obsessed Broadwell is a good fit for regular desktops is anyone’s guess. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel demos next-next-gen “Skylake” processors, coming in late 2015

A big chunk of the Sierra Nevada caught fracturing on video

If you like geology, you’re used to relying on an active imagination. Most geologic processes occur too slowly to see them play out for yourself. Many of the exceptions are dangerous enough that you might not want a front row seat or rare enough that the odds of being there to witness it are disheartening. Sometimes, though, the Earth throws us a bone—or in this case, a gigantic slab of granite. One interesting way that rocks weather and crumble apart is called “exfoliation.” Like the skin-scrubbing technique, this involves the outermost layers of exposed igneous or metamorphic bedrock sloughing off in a sheet. Over time, this tends to smooth and round the outcrop—Yosemite’s Half Dome providing a spectacular example. We’re not entirely sure just what drives the peeling of an outcrop’s skin like this, but the classic explanation is that it’s the result of bringing rocks that formed at great pressure up to the surface. Once there, the outer layers can expand slightly, creating a physical mismatch with the layers below them. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

[Update] iFixit cracks open the Moto 360, finds smaller battery than advertised

Hey that’s not 320 mAh. iFixit/Ron Amadeo iFixit has gotten ahold of the Moto 360 and applied the usual spudgers and heat packs to rip open the little round smartwatch. There weren’t too many surprises (everything is round!) except for the battery: it’s smaller than advertised. In iFixit’s pictures, the 360’s battery is only labeled as 300 mAh, 20 mAh less than advertised . The 300 mAh battery has only 75 percent of the capacity of the 400 mAh battery found in the LG G Watch, and together with the OMAP 3 processor, it’s not a great combination for all-day battery life. We’ve asked Motorola for a comment about the smaller battery in iFixit’s 360, but the company hasn’t gotten back to us yet. We’ll update this post if we hear anything. The company’s response is below. As for the rest of the device, the round LCD looks pretty much the same as it does on the outside, and even the main PCB is round. iFixit managed to nail the processor down to an OMAP3630 , which as we suspected is built on a 45nm process. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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[Update] iFixit cracks open the Moto 360, finds smaller battery than advertised

Tasmanian depths may have been hiding unknown animal phylum

D. enigmata ron the right, with the three larger samples on the left representing D. discoides . PLoS one Over the past few years, studies of genomes have confused what we thought we knew about the origin of animal life. Instead of the simple sponges being the earliest branch off the animal tree, a group of relatively complex organisms, the ctenophores, seem to be the earliest branch . That finding has some serious implications as it suggests that a nervous system evolved twice . Now, some more traditional biology may upset the family tree even further. Old samples taken from the seabed near Tasmania contain examples of two different species that may belong to a phylum entirely unknown to us—one that split off near the base of the animal tree. The strange creatures also have features that suggest they may be related to remains from the Ediacaran, a period in which the first animal life appears in the fossil record. The samples actually date from a research cruise taken nearly 30 years ago, where a “sled” was dragged along the ocean floor and samples returned to the surface. The new species weren’t recognized as interesting when they were first found, so they were left mixed in with the rest of the collection, which was fixed with formaldehyde and then dumped in 80 percent ethanol. The samples suffered a bit of further abuse when one of the authors wanted to refresh the alcohol and was given 100 percent ethanol instead. (The paper actually notes, “Unfortunately absolute alcohol was provided without comment instead of the requested 80 percent ethanol.”) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tasmanian depths may have been hiding unknown animal phylum

Cable companies want to unbundle broadcast TV, and broadcasters are angry

Iain Watson A Congressional proposal to let cable and satellite customers choose which broadcast TV channels they pay for has led to a battle between small cable companies and broadcasters. While cable companies usually are opponents of mandates to sell channels individually instead of in bundles , in this case they are fighting for à la carte and against the broadcasters. The “Local Choice” proposal by US Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) affects local broadcast stations such as affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. A group called TVfreedom.org that represents local broadcasters and other organizations today criticized the American Cable Association (ACA) for supporting Local Choice. “We believe ‘Local Choice’ represents a frontal assault on free and local TV broadcasting,” TVfreedom Public Affairs Director Robert Kenny wrote . “It would tilt television’s balance of power in favor of pay-TV providers at the expense of broadcasters invested in localism. It would cost consumers more on their monthly bills, and do nothing to address shoddy pay-TV service or the deceptive billing practices of cable and satellite TV providers.” TVfreedom is composed of “local broadcasters, community advocates, network television affiliate associations, multicast networks, manufacturers and other independent broadcaster-related organizations” and says its mission is to make sure “cable and satellite TV providers [are] held accountable for stifling innovation and repeatedly using their own customers as bargaining chips while increasing their record profits.” The group chided the ACA for supporting à la carte pricing this year despite arguing in a previous case that “Current technology costs make à la carte a financial impossibility for ACA member systems, the business model is entirely unproven, and no lawful basis exists for imposing regulated a la carte.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Oculus targets $200 to $400 range for consumer version of VR headset

Kyle Orland When Oculus eventually releases a consumer version (CV1) of its Rift virtual reality headset, the company wants to “stay in that $200-$400 price range,” founder Palmer Luckey told Eurogamer in a recent interview. That lines up roughly with the $350 currently being charged for the second Development Kit (DK2) version of the Rift, which began shipping to developers recently. Luckey warned Eurogamer, though, that the consumer version price range “could slide in either direction depending on scale, pre-orders, the components we end up using, business negotiations…” One thing that won’t be sliding around anymore is the technical specs for the CV1. “We know what we’re making and now it’s a matter of making it.” Luckey wouldn’t be pinned down on the specifics of those consumer specs, but he said to expect a jump in resolution above the DK2, similar to the 720p to 1080p jump we saw between the first development kits (DK1) and DK2. Luckey also teased improvements to 90Hz “or higher” refresh rate (up from 75Hz in DK2) and lowered weight and size for the consumer headset. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oculus targets $200 to $400 range for consumer version of VR headset

Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Robyn Lee On Tuesday, a California appeals court ruled that Yelp’s ad sales strategies do not extort small businesses and merely amount to “hard bargaining” by the company. Yelp lets anyone review a business, and businesses can’t opt out of being reviewed. So when Yelp’s ad sales team began calling around asking companies to buy advertising in exchange for displaying good reviews more prominently, some storefronts cried foul. In 2010, four small business owners banded together to sue Yelp for extortion after they refused to buy advertising from Yelp and allegedly found that bad reviews were displayed more prominently. Two of the business owners also alleged that Yelp authored negative reviews to induce them to advertise or in retaliation after the business declined to buy advertising. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Ken May

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