Tag: entertainment

Light-Based Memory Chip Is First To Permanently Store Data

sciencehabit writes: Scientists have developed the first ever memory chip that’s entirely light-based and can store data permanently. Sciencemag reports: “Today’s electronic computer chips work at blazing speeds. But an alternate version that stores, manipulates, and moves data with photons of light instead of electrons would make today’s chips look like proverbial horses and buggies. Now, one team of researchers reports that it has created the first permanent optical memory on a chip, a critical step in that direction. If a more advanced photonic memory can be integrated with photonic logic and interconnections, the resulting chips have the potential to run at 50 to 100 times the speed of today’s computer processors.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Light-Based Memory Chip Is First To Permanently Store Data

Government Finds New Emails Clinton Did Not Hand Over

PolygamousRanchKid writes with this Reuters report that The U.S. Defense Department has found an email chain that Hillary Clinton failed to turn over to the State Department despite her saying she had provided all work emails from her time as Secretary of State.The correspondence with General David Petraeus, who was commander of U.S. Central Command at the time, started shortly before she entered office and continued during her first days as the top U.S. diplomat in January and February of 2009. News of the previously undisclosed email thread only adds to a steady stream of revelations about the emails in the past six months, which have forced Clinton to revise her account of the setup which she first gave in March. Nearly a third of all Democrats and 58 percent of all voters think Clinton is lying about her handling of her emails, according to a Fox News poll released this week. Clinton apologized this month for her email setup, saying it was unwise. But as recently as Sunday, she told CBS when asked about her emails that she provided ‘all of them.’ The emails with Petraeus also appear to contradict the claim by Clinton’s campaign that she used a private BlackBerry email account for her first two months at the department before setting up her clintonemail.com account in March 2009. This was the reason her campaign gave for not handing over any emails from those two months to the State Department. The Petraeus exchange shows she started using the clintonemail.com account by January 2009, according to the State Department. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Government Finds New Emails Clinton Did Not Hand Over

iPhone 6s’s A9 Processor Racks Up Impressive Benchmarks

MojoKid writes: Underneath the hood of Apple’s new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus models is a new custom designed System-on-Chip (SoC) that Apple has dubbed its A9 processor. It’s a 64-bit chip that, according to Apple, is the most advanced ever built for any smartphone, and that’s just one of many claims coming out of Cupertino. Apple is also claiming a level of gaming performance on par with dedicated game consoles and with a graphics engine that’s 90 percent faster than the previous generation. For compute chores, Apple says the A9 chip improves overall CPU performance by up to 70 percent. These performance promises come without divulging too much about the physical makeup of the A9, though in testing its dual-core SoC does seem to compete well with the likes of Samsung’s octal-core Exynos chips found in the Galaxy S6 line. Further, in intial graphics benchmark testing, the A9 also leads the pack in mosts tests, sometimes by a healthy margin, even besting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 in tests like 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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iPhone 6s’s A9 Processor Racks Up Impressive Benchmarks

Phone Passwords Protected By 5th Amendment, Says Federal Court

Ars Technica reports that a Federal court in Pennsylvania ruled Wednesday that the Fifth Amendment protects from compelled disclosure the passwords that two insider-trading suspects used on their mobile phones. In this case, the SEC is investigating two former Capital One data analysts who allegedly used insider information associated with their jobs to trade stocks—in this case, a $150, 000 investment allegedly turned into $2.8 million. Regulators suspect the mobile devices are holding evidence of insider trading and demanded that the two turn over their passcodes. However, ruled the court , “Since the passcodes to Defendants’ work-issued smartphones are not corporate records, the act of producing their personal passcodes is testimonial in nature and Defendants properly invoke their fifth Amendment privilege. A” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Phone Passwords Protected By 5th Amendment, Says Federal Court

Mozilla Fixed a 14-Year-Old Bug In Firefox, Now Adblock Plus Uses Less Memory

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla launched Firefox 41 yesterday. Today, Adblock Plus confirmed the update “massively improves” the memory usage of its Firefox add-on. This particular memory issue was brought up in May 2014 by Mozilla and by Adblock Plus. But one of the bugs that contributed to the problem was actually first reported on Bugzilla in April 2001 (bug 77999). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Fixed a 14-Year-Old Bug In Firefox, Now Adblock Plus Uses Less Memory

Study: People Emit a "Germ Cloud" of Bacteria As Unique As a Fingerprint

An anonymous reader writes: According to a new study, we are all surrounded by a personal “germ cloud” as unique as a fingerprint. Lead author of the study Dr James Meadow says: “We expected that we would be able to detect the human microbiome in the air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud. Our results confirm that an occupied space is microbially distinct from an unoccupied one, and demonstrate for the first time that individuals release their own personalized microbial cloud.” The findings were published today in the journal PeerJ. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Study: People Emit a "Germ Cloud" of Bacteria As Unique As a Fingerprint

Nvidia crams desktop GTX 980 GPU into monster 17-inch laptops

MSI’s GT72 will be one of the first notebook’s to sport a GTX 980. 26 more images in gallery In what is one of the most Goldblum-like moments of the year so far, Nvidia has partnered with OEMs like Asus and MSI to cram the full desktop version of its high-end GTX 980 graphics card into laptops. Thanks to its full array of 2048 CUDA cores, up to 8GB of 7GHz GDDR5 memory, and 1126MHz core clock, Nvidia claims the new laptop GTX 980 offers around a 30 percent performance boost over its previous flagship laptop GPU, the GTX 980M. Even crazier, Nvidia has also managed to convince OEMs to let users overclock the GTX 980 too. Coupled with Intel’s upcoming unlocked K-series Skylake laptop CPUs, users will be able to eke out a significant amount of extra performance from their laptops, cooling permitting. To help things along, Nvidia’s laptop GTX 980s will differ slightly from their desktop counterparts in that they’ll be binned for improved leakage and power consumption. Nvidia says the binning process will ensure each laptop GTX 980 is guaranteed to hit the advertised 1126MHz GPU core clock and 1216MHz boost clock, as well as achieve overclocks somewhere in the region of 200MHz. That’s a modest increase over the stock clock, but given the thermal restraints of a notebook chassis it’s still rather impressive. To hit those overclocked speeds, users will be able to tweak the fan curve of the GPU (a first for laptops), as well as adjust the core clock and memory speeds. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nvidia crams desktop GTX 980 GPU into monster 17-inch laptops

Michigan Sues HP Over Decade Long, $49 Million Incomplete Project

itwbennett writes: On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s. Through the suit filed in Kent County Circuit Court, the state seeks $11 million in damages along with attorney’s fees and the funds needed to rebid and re-procure the contract. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Michigan Sues HP Over Decade Long, $49 Million Incomplete Project

Apple’s iOS 9 Breaks VPNs

An anonymous reader writes with a report from The Stack that researchers have discovered a crucial security problem in the latest version of iOS 9: it breaks VPN connections to corporate servers. According to the linked piece, “The flaw was first detected in the iOS 9 beta, and has not been fixed in the released version. Neither has the bug been removed in the current iOS 9.1 beta.” The workaround might not be what you want to hear, either, if you’ve happily upgraded to the latest version: it’s to downgrade to iOS 8.4.1. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple’s iOS 9 Breaks VPNs

How Wind and Politics Pushed the Price of Texas Electricity Below Zero

Slate dissects the strange circumstances that led the price of electricity in Texas to briefly dip not just to zero, but into negative territory, reaching at one point negative $8.52 per megawatt hour. Why? A combination of being an “electricity island” with only weak ties to the surrounding state’s grids; strong wind in a state that’s sprouted thousands of windmills; and infrastructure design that means the only real buyer for most electricity producers’ output is ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. (One of the comments attached to the story notes that Texas is not completely isolated from the national grid, but it’s still markedly isolated.) A slice: Demand fell—at 4 a.m., the amount of electricity needed in the state was about 45 percent lower than the evening peak. The wind was blowing consistently—much later in the day Texas would establish a new instantaneous wind generation record. At 3 a.m., wind was supplying about 30 percent of the state’s electricity, as this daily wind integration report shows. And because the state is an electricity island, all the power produced by the state’s wind farms could only be sold to ERCOT, not grids elsewhere in the country. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Wind and Politics Pushed the Price of Texas Electricity Below Zero