Tag: feeds

Microsoft comes to its senses, allows Office 2013 to move PCs

In a substantial regression from the terms offered for Office 2010, the original Office 2013 license died with your PC . You couldn’t install a retail copy of Office on a new PC, even if you removed it from the old one. But after much public outcry, Microsoft has relented . The Office 2013 terms and conditions are being updated so that transfers are allowed. You’ll be allowed one transfer every 90 days unless the transfers are due to hardware failures. (In that case they can be made immediately.) The change is effective immediately, but it will take some time before it trickles out to the activation servers. If you’re transferring Office 2013 to a different PC and activation fails, you’ll have to call customer support. Microsoft insists that the support people know the score and will be able to activate you manually. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Visit site:
Microsoft comes to its senses, allows Office 2013 to move PCs

How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi’s operating system

Aurich Lawson When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn’t come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just  turned one year old , we decided to find out how  Raspbian —the officially recommended Pi operating system—came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers. Like the Raspberry Pi itself, an unexpected success story Although there are numerous operating systems for the Pi, the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends one for the general populace. When the Pi was born a year ago, the  recommended operating system was a version of Red Hat’s Fedora tailored to the computer’s ARM processor. But within a few months, Fedora fell out of favor on the Pi and was replaced by Raspbian. It’s a version of Debian painstakingly rebuilt for the Raspberry Pi by two volunteers named Mike Thompson and Peter Green. Read 53 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the article:
How two volunteers built the Raspberry Pi’s operating system

Five features iOS should steal from Android

Aurich Lawson, Age 5 If you’ve come anywhere near a tech site in the last year or so, you’ve heard it all before. “iOS is getting stale compared to Android! It needs some new ideas!” Whether that’s actually true is up for (heated) debate, but those with an open mind are usually willing to acknowledge that Apple and Google could afford to swap a few ideas when it comes to their mobile OSes. So in a fantasy world where we could bring over some of the better Android features to iOS, which features would those be? Among the Ars staff, we sometimes have spirited “conversations” about what aspects would be the best for each company to photocopy. So, we thought we’d pick a few that might go over well with iOS users. Don’t worry, we have a companion post of features that Android could afford to steal from iOS. The copying can go both ways. No one wants iOS to become Android or vice versa. This is about recognizing how to improve iOS with features that would be useful to people depending on their smartphones for more than the occasional text or phone call. We recognize that Apple tries to keep an eye towards elegant implementation, too. So which features are we talking about? Glad you asked… Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original article here:
Five features iOS should steal from Android

Sodium-air battery shows potential

Pete Slater With battery technology being critical for so many things, interest in building better batteries just keeps on growing. The recent Tesla Model S testing debacle, explosive laptop batteries , and Boeing battery problems give us hints at how close to the edge engineers operate batteries. Volume, weight, and energy are key. Minimize the first two and maximize the last to obtain energy storage nirvana. Lithium-ion batteries rule the roost at the moment, but as capacities are already on the order of 200Wh/kg, we’re pushing up against their limits—basic chemical reactions provide a fixed amount of energy. The search for alternatives is being pursued by a rapidly growing field of eyebrow-less engineers (just kidding; battery mishaps don’t happen that often ). A recent publication on a sodium-air battery shows promise, but it also demonstrates what a huge amount of work still needs to be done. The key to a battery is a simple chemical reaction that, at its heart, is the exchange of an electron. During the exchange, a certain amount of energy is released, usually in the form of heat. That’s why, when you drop some sodium metal in water, the energy released is enough to cause explosions. The role of the battery is to intercept that electron and release its energy in the form of useful work. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original post:
Sodium-air battery shows potential

Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Adobe has released an emergency security update for its widely used Flash media player to patch a vulnerability being actively exploited on the Internet. The company is advising Windows and Mac users to install it in the next 72 hours. An advisory the software company issued on Tuesday said only that affected Flash flaws “are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking a link which directs to a website serving malicious Flash (SWF) content.” It identified the bugs as CVE-2013-0643 and CVE-2013-0648 as indexed in the common vulnerabilities and exposures database . The advisory added the exploits targeted the Firefox browser. A spokeswoman said no other attack details are available. Adobe’s advisory assigns a priority rating of 1 to Flash versions that run on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X computers. The rating is reserved for “vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild.” The priority for Linux users carries a rating of 3, which is used to designate “vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Human hearing beats sound’s uncertainty limit, makes MP3s sound worse

New Jersey Modern audio compression algorithms rely on observations about auditory perceptions. For instance, we know that a low-frequency tone can render a higher tone inaudible. This perception is used to save space by removing the tones we expect will be inaudible. But our expectations are complicated by the physics of waves and our models of how human audio perception works. This problem has been highlighted in a recent Physical Review Letter , in which researchers demonstrated the vast majority of humans can perceive certain aspects of sound far more accurately than allowed by a simple reading of the laws of physics. Given that many encoding algorithms start their compression with operations based on that simple physical understanding, the researchers believe it may be time to revisit audio compression. Time and frequency: Two sides of the same coin You’ll notice I didn’t say, “human hearing violates the laws of physics,” even though it was very tempting. The truth is that nothing violates the laws of physics, though many things violate the simplified models we use to approximate them. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Human hearing beats sound’s uncertainty limit, makes MP3s sound worse

Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Four months after Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 with and for Windows 8, Redmond has finally released a version of the company’s newest browser for its 700 million Windows 7 users in 95 other languages too. The new browser will be available as an optional update immediately. Anyone with the release preview installed will have it sent as an “important” update. That’s significant because Windows Update will, in its default configuration, install it silently and automatically. Over coming months, Microsoft will classify Internet Explorer 10 as “important” in more and more markets to ensure it is installed automatically as widely as possible. This marks a significant change from Microsoft’s past practices. Traditionally, the company has released new browsers only as optional updates, and further, as interactive updates that required clicking through a EULA before installation actually took place. In late 2011, the company changed this policy, converting Internet Explorer 9 to an automatic (“important”) update. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Earthquakes’ booms big enough to be detected from orbit

Artist’s impression of GOCE satellite. European Space Agency Last year, we reported on some mysterious booms in a small Wisconsin town that turned out to be small earthquakes. While it was an unusual story, it’s actually not that uncommon of an occurrence. Early in the summer of 2001, folks in Spokane, Washington started reporting similar booms. The sounds continued, off and on, for about five months. The mystery didn’t last long, as the earthquakes responsible were picked up by seismometers in the area. (A particularly loud one that took place exactly one month after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York did rattle some nerves, however.) In total, 105 earthquakes were detected, with a couple as large as magnitude 4.0. For most of them, there wasn’t good enough seismometer coverage to really pinpoint locations, but some temporary units deployed around the city in July located a number of events pretty precisely: the earthquakes were centered directly beneath the city itself. While a dangerously large earthquake is pretty unlikely in Wisconsin, the possibility can’t be ignored in Washington. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand was only a magnitude 6.3, but the damage was extensive because the epicenter was so close to the city. In L’Aquila, Italy, a swarm of small earthquakes in 2009 was followed by a deadly magnitude 6.3. (The poor public communication of risk during that swarm netted six seismologists manslaughter convictions .) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
Earthquakes’ booms big enough to be detected from orbit

Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z, one of the hardiest and most svelte tablets we’ve seen. Sony Sony is unveiling a new Android tablet, the Xperia Tablet Z, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday. Sony claims the tablet is not only the “world’s thinnest 10.1-inch tablet” at 6.9 millimeters, but it’s apparently waterproof in up to three feet of water for 30 minutes. Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z has a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 1920×1200 display running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. (Sony has gone scouts-honor that the tablet will be updated to 4.2 “after launch.”) The tablet weighs 495 grams (1.05 pounds) and it has an 8-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front camera, plus 16GB/32GB storage configurations with a microSD slot than can take up to a 64GB card. The tablet also contains an IR blaster that works with a special version of an app Sony has created called TV SideView. TV SideView integrates with a user’s cable provider and allows users to browse the program guide as well as currently airing content. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original post:
Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

Server hack prompts call for cPanel customers to take “immediate action”

The providers of the cPanel website management application are warning some users to immediately change their systems’ root or administrative passwords after discovering one of its servers has been hacked. In an e-mail sent to customers who have filed a cPanel support request in the past six months, members of the company’s security team said they recently discovered the compromise of a server used to process support requests. “While we do not know if your machine is affected, you should change your root level password if you are not already using SSH keys,” they wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail posted to a community forum . “If you are using an unprivileged account with ‘sudo’ or ‘su’ for root logins, we recommend you change the account password. Even if you are using SSH keys we still recommend rotating keys on a regular basis.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
Server hack prompts call for cPanel customers to take “immediate action”