fitness – Page 13 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Microsoft’s prototype keyboard cover has an e-ink touchscreen

Tablets are becoming more useful for getting real work done. Looking to further bridge the gap between slate and laptop, Microsoft Applied Sciences built a prototype device it calls the DisplayCover: a keyboard cover that houses an e-ink touchscreen display. The 1, 280 x 305 resolution panel not only provides access to app shortcuts, but it can also handle touch gestures for navigation and accept stylus input. The stylus feature seems to make things like signing documents and scribbling notes a breeze, based on the demo video. In the case of an app like Photoshop where you need constant access to tool palettes, those items can be parked at the top of the keyboard so they don’t take up valuable space on the tablet’s display (in this case a Surface ). Why e-ink? Well, the team says the material was selected because it wouldn’t put too much added strain on battery life like a full-color touch panel would. Sure, the DisplayCover is a prototype that’s obviously far from finished. However, it’s interesting to take a look at what companies are doing to make efficient use of small screen sizes for maximizing productivity. [Thanks, Antonio] Filed under: Peripherals , Microsoft Comments Source: Microsoft Applied Sciences Tags: cover, displaycover, e-ink, keyboardcover, microsoft, surface, tablet, touchscreen

Twitter shuts down accounts monitoring politicians’ deleted tweets

After suspending API access to the Open State Foundation’s (OSF) primary American account in May, Twitter went ahead and nixed the foundation’s 30 remaining satellite accounts over the weekend. OSF employed these accounts to monitor and publicize the deleted tweets of elected officials in countries worldwide. Twitter also shut down the group’s Diplotwoops account, which served the same purpose but for diplomats. Notice:Twitter have killed part of @politwoops that powers this account. No new posts for now but tweets available at http://t.co/w6y19ppzRZ — Tweets MPs Delete (@deletedbyMPs) August 22, 2015 Twitter reportedly decided to shut out the OSF after “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors.” The foundation cited a note from Twitter regarding its decision, stating “Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable? No one user is more deserving of that ability than another.” The OSF has since released a statement on the matter: What elected politicians publicly say is a matter of public record. Even when tweets are deleted, it’s part of parliamentary history. These tweets were once posted and later deleted. What politicians say in public should be available to anyone. This is not about typos but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice. It should be noted however that Twitter is not a government entity and, even here in the US, has precisely zero responsibility to allow accounts that it feels violate its TOS. In light of the shutdown, the foundation states that it will continue working ensure messages sent by elected politicians remain visible. Just not on Twitter. Filed under: Internet Comments Via: The Next Web Source: Open State Foundation Tags: openstatefoundation, OSF, politics, twitter

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Twitter shuts down accounts monitoring politicians’ deleted tweets

Google gives the world a peek at its secret servers

Google has given everyone a rare look inside its server rooms and detailed how keeps up with the massive growth of its search business. In a blog post , Google Fellow Amin Vadat said that the company’s current network, Jupiter, can deliver a petabit per second of total throughput. That means each of its 100, 000 total servers can randomly speak to each other at a speed of 10Gb/s, a hundred times faster than the first-generation network it created in 2005. To get there, Google did something surprising — it built its own hardware from off-the-shelf parts. It was back in 2004 that Google decided to stray away from products by established companies like Cisco and build its own hardware using off-the-shelf chips from companies like Qualcomm. The aim was to put less onus on the hardware and more on software, something that’s impossible with off-the-shelf switches. Vadat said hardware switching is “manual and error prone… and could not scale to meet our needs.” Using software switching was not only cheaper but easier to implement remotely — critical for a company whose bandwidth requirements have doubled (or more) every year. Google considers its servers as a key advantage over rivals like Microsoft and Amazon, so why is it talking now? For one, it’s recently started selling its cloud services to other businesses, so it’s keen to brag about them. It’s also being pragmatic — its data requirements are now so huge that it needs academic help to solve configuration and management challenges. That’s why it’s presenting the paper at the Sigcomm networking conference in London, and if you’re in the mood for a (much) deeper dive, you can read it here . Filed under: Peripherals , Internet , Google Comments Via: WSJ Source: Google Tags: DataCenters, google, GoogleCloud, Growth, Servers, Switches

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Google gives the world a peek at its secret servers

‘Final Fantasy VII’ lands on iOS with built-in cheat codes

If you can’t find your old PSOne discs, don’t want the PC version and don’t have a PS4 , there’s now one more way to play Final Fantasy VII : on your iPhone . Today Square Enix launched the classic jRPG for devices running iOS 8.0 and up. At its core, this release is a simple port of the PC version of the game, but developers have made a few minor tweaks to the title palatable on the small screen. Leveling up won’t be an issue on the mobile version of the game, for instance: the iOS version has a “max stats” command that instantly raises your character’s levels. Your all-powerful party won’t have to deal with time-sucking random battles, either — they can be turned off. Finally, Square Enix has decided not to give the game a customized touch-friendly menu as it has with some of its other mobile Final Fantasy ports, opting to overlay the screen with a virtual joypad instead. Final Fantasy VII for iOS launches today, but it’s on a slow rollout: at the time of this writing, it only seems to be available in New Zealand, for $19.99 NZD (which converts to about $13 in greenbacks). Check out the New Zealand product page here or hit up Square Enix’s official YouTube channel to watch the trailer. Filed under: Gaming , Mobile Comments Source: YouTube , iTunes (1) , (2) Tags: finalfantasy, finalfantasyvii, gaming, ios, iPhone, mobilepostcross, Square-Enix, squareenix, videogames

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‘Final Fantasy VII’ lands on iOS with built-in cheat codes

Parallels 11 brings Microsoft’s Cortana to Macs before Siri

The latest version of Parallels, the popular Windows virtualization tool for Mac OS X, almost feels like it’s trolling Apple. One of Parallels 11’s key features, alongside full Windows 10 support, is its ability to put Microsoft’s Cortana right on your OS X desktop. That’s right — you could have a Windows-powered virtual assistant on your Mac long before Siri reaches the desktop. Parallels has already made it possible to run Windows apps directly on your Mac desktop for years with its “Coherence mode, ” but this latest update marks the first time it’s brought over a Windows feature on its own. Slideshow-313636 In a brief demonstration, Parallel’s Cortana feature (which requires a Windows 10 virtual installation, naturally) worked just like it did on Windows 10 proper, with decent voice recognition and no noticeable delays. It can even take advantage of your Mac’s location data, making it practically indistinguishable from a native OS X app. Parallels 11 also packs in the usual performance improvements: It can launch and shut down Windows around 50 percent faster than the last version, and a new “travel mode” can save up to 25 percent of your battery life. But really, the main reason you’d want to upgrade is to put Cortana on your OS X desktop and freak out all your friends. Parallels 11 is available today for $80, though users of the past two versions can upgrade for $50. And if you need more out of your Windows virtual machine, there’s also Parallels 11 for Mac Pro Edition, which will take advantage of that machine’s beefy hardware. It’ll cost you $100 a year, or $50 a year if you’re upgrading from Parallels 9 or 10. Filed under: Software Comments Tags: Cortana, Macs, OSX, Parallels, Parallels11, Windows10

The software Stephen Hawking uses to talk to the world is now free

For almost 20 years, Intel has been building technology to help Stephen Hawking communicate with the world — and now the company is making the same software the world renowned physicist uses to write books, give speeches and talk available to everybody . For free. It’s called the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT), and it’s the very same software Intel baked Swiftkey into for Hawkings early last year. Releasing it as open source software was always the plan, giving engineers, developers and researchers a groundwork they can use to create technology that improves the lives of patients with motor neuron disease and other conditions that make using typical computer interfaces impossible. Right now ACAT uses webcam-based face recognition for user control, but Intel says developers can augment it with custom inputs. As is, it still works pretty well: I installed it on a Windows tablet for a quick test run and was able to type simple words by flexing my face muscles in the same manner as Professor Hawking — patiently waiting for the ACAT system to highlight the menu, letter or predictive text word I wanted before moving my cheek. The system can also open documents, browse the web and gives users surprisingly precise cursor control. The base software is available for free on Github , and Intel is hosting a separate site with documentation, videos on features and compatible sensors and a detailed manual to help users get started. If you’re having trouble, you can even contact the project’s lead directly (his email is published on the ACAT website) for help. All in all, the project’s public release is a great step forward to achieving Professor Hawking’s dream of making connected wheelchair and assistive computer technology to every person that needs it. Check out the project’s official Git.Hub page or Intel’s project page at the source link below. [Top image credit: Jason Bye / Alamy] Filed under: Misc , Intel Comments Source: Wired , ACAT , Github Tags: acat, AssistiveTechnology, hawking, intel, stephenhawking

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The software Stephen Hawking uses to talk to the world is now free

NASA’s LADEE confirms the moon’s atmosphere has neon

NASA’s LADEE ran out of fuel and crashed into the lunar surface in 2014, but not before it collected the data needed to answer some decades-old questions about the moon. One of those is confirming that our natural satellite’s atmosphere contains neon — the same gas used to light up signs in Vegas. Astronomers have been speculating about its presence since the Apollo missions, and now LADEE’s Neutral Mass Spectrometer (NMS) instrument has proven that it exists. It’s even relatively abundant, though the moon’s atmosphere is too thin (it’s actually called “exosphere” due to that reason) to turn it into a glowing orb in the sky. NMS has thus proven that the lunar exosphere is composed mostly of helium, argon and neon. Their main source is solar winds, and they fluctuate over time, as well as exhibit peak times throughout the day. LADEE’s data shows, however, that some of the gases in the exosphere come from the moon itself: The decay of radioactive potassium-40 found in lunar rocks gives rise to argon, while thorium and uranium produce helium. As NASA’s Goddard’s Mehdi Benna said: The data collected by the NMS addresses the long-standing questions related to the sources and sinks of exospheric helium and argon that have remained unanswered for four decades. These discoveries highlight the limitations of current exospheric models, and the need for more sophisticated ones in the future. [Image credit: NASA Ames/Dana Berry] Filed under: Science Comments Source: NASA Tags: ladee, moon, nasa

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NASA’s LADEE confirms the moon’s atmosphere has neon

IBM wires up ‘neuromorphic’ chips like a rodent’s brain

IBM has been working with DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics ( SyNAPSE ) program since 2008 to develop computing systems that work less like conventional computers and more like the neurons inside your brain. After years of development, IBM has finally unveiled the system to the public as part of a three-week “boot camp” training session for academic and government researchers. The TrueNorth system, as it’s been dubbed, employs modular chips that act like neurons. By stringing multiple chips together researchers can essentially build an artificial neural network. The version that IBM just debuted contains about 48 million connections — roughly the same computing capacity as a rat’s brain — over an array of 48 chips. These systems are designed to run “deep learning” algorithms — similar to Facebook’s new facial recognition feature or Skype’s insta-translate function — but at a fraction of the cost, electrical draw and space needed by conventional data centers. For example, a TrueNorth chip contains 5.4 billion transistors but only uses 70 mw of power. An Intel processor, conversely contains just 1.4 billion transistors and draws between 35 and 140 watts. In fact, future iterations of the TrueNorth system could (theoretically at least) be shrunk small enough to fit inside cell phones or smart watches. These chips also hold an advantage over the GPUs (graphics chips) and FPGAs (function-specific programmable chips) that the industry currently uses because TrueNorth chips operate much the same way that the deep learning algorithms running on them do. With it, IBM hopes to eventually shift some of the computing power requirements away from traditional data centers and onto end user devices. This should speed up the computing process since data isn’t being sent back and forth over the network. Instead, companies could simply develop a deep learning model (say, to count the number of cars in a photo), upload it to a central data server and then have the model run on the user’s TrueNorth-enabled device. The system would be able to spot every car in the user’s image gallery without having to upload each photo to the remote server for processing. Unfortunately, the system is still in its infancy and years away from your phone. [Image Credit: IBM] Filed under: Google , Facebook Comments Via: Wired Source: IBM Tags: computing, deeplearning, facebook, FPGA, google, GPU, IBM, neuralnetwork, neuromorphic, Skype, SyNAPSE

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IBM wires up ‘neuromorphic’ chips like a rodent’s brain

OwnStar car hacker can remotely unlock BMWs, Benz and Chrysler

Last month security researcher Samy Kamar announced a vulnerability that allowed him to remotely unlock OnStar-enabled GM cars . While that issue has been fixed, it looks like the same vulnerability found in OnStar is also present in BMW Remote, Mercedes’ mbrace and Chrysler’s Uconnect. Kumar told Engadget via email, “the issue itself is the same exact SSL certificate issue that affected OnStar/GM (which they’ve resolved two weeks ago). It was barely any tweaking of the original system — a few lines of code to add support per vehicle.” Uh oh. I’ve updated OwnStar to also unlock cars from and attack BMW Remote, Mercedes-Benz mbrace, and Chrysler Uconnect. https://t.co/qRsjtLnRlM — Samy Kamkar (@samykamkar) August 13, 2015 The OwnStar device intercepts communication between a vehicle and its companion app and sends that information — including login information — to Kamar who then has control of the vehicle via the app and can unlock it. If you’re feeling smug about your vehicle because Kamar hasn’t called it out, you might want to curb that. The SSL certificate issue that allows a person to log in to a vehicle is pretty widespread. “Unfortunately it’s prevalent among half the other mobile unlocking apps I’ve tested, ” Kamar said. A Chrysler spokesperson told Engadget, “Consumer safety and security is our highest priority.” And that it “supports the responsible disclosure and remediation of cyber security vulnerabilities. Consistent with our focus on consumer safety and security FCA US opposes irresponsible disclosure of explicit ‘how to’ information that can help criminals gain unauthorized access to vehicles and vehicle systems.” Kamar won’t be releasing the updated code for OwnStar for at least 30 days so the automakers have a chance to update their systems. But if you’re an automaker that hasn’t been called out by hackers or security researchers, you might want to check your systems anyways. We have contacted BMW and Mercedes Benz for this article and will update when they reply to our queries. Filed under: Misc , Transportation Comments Source: Samy Kamar Tags: BMW, Chrysler, MercedesBenz, OwnStar, SamyKamar, Security

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OwnStar car hacker can remotely unlock BMWs, Benz and Chrysler

FDA demands Kim Kardashian remove Instagram pill ad

The FDA sent Kim Kardashian a warning letter last week, demanding that she remove an Instagram post in which she endorsed a bottle of Diclegis morning sickness pills but failed to mention any of the potential side effects associated with the product. Kardashian is a paid promoter of the product, which is made by Duchesnay USA. Her post “misleadingly fails to provide material information about the consequences that may result from the use of the drug and suggests that it is safer than has been demonstrated, ” according to the FDA. While most of the effects that she failed to mention are relatively benign — such as drowsiness and interactions with alcohol or “excitement, irritability and sedation” in infants who breast feed from women taking the drug — one neglected fact is actually quite important: it’s never been tested for use with hyperemesis gravidarum, the most severe form of morning sickness. Faced with “FDA regulatory action, including seizure or injunction, without further notice, ” Kardashian has since deleted the post, though not before it gained 434, 000 likes. [Image Credit: GC Images] Filed under: Internet Comments Via: Salon Source: FDA Tags: Diclegis, drugs, FDA, instagram, Internet, kimkardashian, morningsickness, pregnancy, regulation

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FDA demands Kim Kardashian remove Instagram pill ad