fnself-program1 – Page 16 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Snapdragon 820 is official: A look at its GPU (and how much the chip matters)

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and 808 will continue to be its flagship chips for the rest of this year, but, as we’ve written, the 810 in particular has been problematic for the company. It had a gift for generating both heat and bad press , and, while the Snapdragon 808 didn’t suffer from the same problems, it was less of an improvement over older 800-series chips. As this has been happening on the technical side, things have been looking less rosy on the financial side. Qualcomm’s outlook for Q4 of 2015 ( PDF ) sums it up nicely: there’s “increased concentration” at the high end of the market, pushing out phones that use Snapdragon SoCs (the huge worldwide success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus can be at least partially blamed); “lower demand” for high-end Snapdragons from one of Qualcomm’s major customers (read: Samsung, which is using its own chips in high-end Galaxy phones); and lowered sales of “certain handset models” in China using high-end Snapdragons. Some of this could be attributed to the 810 specifically, but a lot of it would be happening no matter how good the chip was. Most of the money in consumer electronics is in high-end, high-margin products, but Apple controls an overwhelming amount of that market , and the company only uses Qualcomm’s modems, not the (presumably more expensive and profitable) Snapdragon SoCs. The wider smartphone market continues to grow, but companies like Xiaomi and Motorola are willing to sell to good-to-great phones for one-third to one-half of what you’d pay for a flagship, and those phones often use lower-end, less-profitable Qualcomm SoCs or chips from an upstart like MediaTek or a newly competitive Intel. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Snapdragon 820 is official: A look at its GPU (and how much the chip matters)

Smach Zero: A portable x86 Steam Machine for $300

Even the most hardened of Valve fans would be hard pressed to call the company’s Steam Machine initiative particularly exciting. After all, with the exception of Alienware’s Alpha or Asus’ ROG, most of them are simply glorified tower PCs, rather than innovative pieces of console-like design. Today, however, that all changes with the Smach Zero, an x86-based portable Steam Machine that promises access to the 1000+ SteamOS games in Valve’s library. The Smach Zero is powered by an AMD G-Series SoC named Steppe Eagle, which features a Jaguar-based CPU paired with a GCN-based GPU. We don’t know which G-Series SoC is actually being used, but presumably it’ll be one of the 6W or 9W TDP parts (PDF). The CPU is probably clocked somewhere around 1GHz, and the GPU between 200-300MHz (roughly equivalent to an HD 8210E). Along with the SoC, there’s 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (expandable via an SD card slot), a 5-inch 720p touchscreen, HDMI output, WiFi, and Bluetooth. On the front of the Smach Zero there are “configurable tactile gamepads,” which look suspiciously like the ones that Valve initially had on the Steam Controller before its redesign. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Smach Zero: A portable x86 Steam Machine for $300

No more endless CDs for pennies: Columbia House files for bankruptcy

It’s a sad day for the musical childhood of many generations. The Associated Press is reporting that the parent company of Columbia House, the organization behind the famous music and DVD clubs of yore, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The move comes after nearly 20 years of declining sales according to the AP. Filmed Entertainment (Columbia House’s parent company) told the wire service that revenue hit a high of $1.4 billion in 1996. In 2014, that figure fell to $17 million (or roughly 1 percent of its peak, the AP notes). While Chapter 11 protection doesn’t necessarily mean Filmed Entertainment intends to go out of business, it’s not looking good. Companies like RadioShack and Kodak have done this in recent years to obtain a certain period of time within which to rebuild itself and shield itself from creditors. Kodak at least emerged from its situation. The service started in 1955 with vinyl records, and Columbia House introduced pop culture fans to many, many film and music entities over the years through its service. It operated on offers like eight CDs for 1¢ (plus shipping!) or an 8-track tape of the month club (relying on a “return or pay to keep” philosophy). But physical media at large has gradually fallen out of favor over the years, and services from Napster to Netflix to iTunes all overlap with what Columbia House intended to do. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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No more endless CDs for pennies: Columbia House files for bankruptcy

Spaniard fatally gored while trying to film bull run on smartphone

While the Spanish town of Pamplona hosts the world’s most well-known running of the bulls, other cities in Spain, Portugal, and nearby nations host their own annual runs where bulls run through city streets while locals and tourists run alongside—or away from—the giant beasts. For one participant of a Sunday bull run in Villasecra de la Sagra, Spain, trying to share his experience by way of a smartphone recording ended traumatically. According to details ascertained from a local Spanish-language report , an English-language AFP report , and bystander video of the incident, a 32-year-old man was gored from behind while attempting to film that city’s annual bull run. The bystander video, posted Sunday on Instagram (not linked here due to its graphic nature), showed the currently unidentified victim standing near a barricade so that he was behind other viewers and away from the general fray of the bull run. However, a stray bull appeared to become separated from the general herd, at which point it ran at full speed behind the crowd and struck the 32-year-old while he was holding a smartphone to film in the opposite direction. According to reports, after receiving brief treatment at a nearby bullring’s medical center, the victim was transferred to a hospital in nearby Toledo, where he was soon pronounced dead from neck and thigh wounds. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spaniard fatally gored while trying to film bull run on smartphone

Last New Zealand coal plant reaches the end of the line

Yesterday, one of New Zealand’s major energy producers announced that it is planning on shuttering the last of the country’s coal-fired power stations in 2018. The plant’s extended life comes despite the fact that running it has become economically marginal—the company that runs it says it is locked into a coal delivery contract until mid-2017 and has substantial stockpiles on site. New Zealand is fortunate to have abundant renewable energy sources, including a number of large hydroelectric plants. Fossil fuels have mostly been used to supplement the hydroelectric production during years of lower rainfall. But the country has also benefitted from trends that are seen in most other industrialized nations. Energy demand has largely been stable due to increased efficiency, while the cost of other renewable power sources has dropped. In New Zealand’s case, those new sources are wind and geothermal (part of the country sits atop a subduction zone). As the costs of developing wind and geothermal have dropped, the coal fired plant was being used less frequently. “These units have largely been operating at the margin of the market for a number of years, at very low utilisation rates,” said company CEO Albert Brantley. Shuttering them is expected to save the company over NZ$20 million a year. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Last New Zealand coal plant reaches the end of the line

A new polymer that can boost capacitors

From hybrid and electric vehicles to underground exploration of fossil-fuels, our search for energy solutions has increasingly placed us in situations demanding electricity storage and delivery under extreme conditions. Though batteries are the reigning storage technology, capacitors are an alternative with several advantages: they’re lightweight, they can be charged and discharged relatively quickly, and they don’t lose their storage capacity over time. In order to function properly, capacitors require dielectric materials, which behave as insulators and are essential for charge storage. Polymeric dielectrics have enhanced performance over other materials, and they can operate under more intense electric fields without failing (termed higher breakdown strength) and greater reliability. They also have the added benefit of practicality, being scalable, lightweight, and easily manipulated. Right now, their major drawback as a material is their inability to work at high temperatures, like those required in many applications. But a composite polymer has finally been developed that seems to break down the traditional limitations of these materials, promising to open up a broader range of uses. Scientists made the new material by crosslinking a traditional polymer embedded with flakes of boron nitride nano sheets. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A new polymer that can boost capacitors

Ebola vaccine trial in Guinea suggests it’s 100% effective

Today, The Lancet released the results of a large field trial of a vaccine against Ebola, and the results are more than promising. Within the limitations of the study, the vaccine appears to be 100 percent effective. The results were so good that the trial itself has been stopped, and the vaccine is now being used to control the spread of the disease. The vaccine is made by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, which licensed it from the Public Health Agency of Canada. It was developed through what has become a fairly standard approach. A harmless virus ( vesicular stomatitis virus , or VSV) was engineered so that it also carried the gene for Ebola’s major surface protein, simply called glycoprotein. When people receive the vaccination, a harmless infection follows, which triggers an immune response. This response targets not only VSV but the Ebola protein as well. Ideally, once the infection is eliminated, the immune system is able to recognize both VSV and Ebola. The trial, performed in southern Guinea, ran from April through July 20th of this year (the analysis, paper writing, and peer review must have proceeded at a staggering pace). It used what is called a “ring” design: once an infected individual was identified, a ring of potentially exposed individuals around them was identified. These individuals lived with the infected one, had contact with them after symptoms appeared, or came in contact with their clothes, bedding, or bodily fluids. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ebola vaccine trial in Guinea suggests it’s 100% effective

Chrome tests “discarding” background tabs to save memory

How many tabs do you have open right now? I’m currently writing and researching this article, writing and researching another, longer article, listening to SoundCloud, and monitoring Ars chat, TweetDeck, and Parsely—so I’ve got 71 tabs open across my six monitors taking up 10GB of RAM. (I admit that I’m probably on the upper end of things.) I’m not using all of those tabs right now, but I do need them open—open tabs are my to-do list. The problem is that Chrome keeps all of these tabs up and running at 100% whether I’m using them or not. This is bad for memory usage and—if you’re running on a laptop—power usage. A new feature being tested in the nightly “Canary” version of Chrome seems like a boon for heavy tab users like me: it will “discard” tabs that aren’t being used when it encounters a low-memory situation. “Discarding” a tab doesn’t mean forcibly closing a tab, just suspending it and unloading it from memory. The tab itself would still be visible in the tab bar, but unloading it would save your computer the work of keeping it running. The feature has existed in Chrome OS for some time, but now it’s moving over to Windows and Mac OS, with a Linux implementation coming soon. Chrome has a tab ranking system, and it would automatically suspend your “least interesting” tabs when it hits a low-memory situation. A Chromium.org page lists the ranking system for tabs: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sony’s profits triple as PS4 sales reach 25 million units worldwide

Sony’s profits have more than tripled year-on-year in the April to June quarter ( PDF link ), thanks to strong sales of camera sensors and the PlayStation 4, which has now sold 25.3 million units globally to date. The company’s overall net profit rose to ¥82.4 billion yen (£425 million, $664 million), significantly surpassing market expectations. Sony moved three million PS4s during the quarter, while peripheral and software shipments also increased, leading to the division’s 12.1 percent increase in sales to ¥288.6 billion (£1.4 billion, $2.3 billion), and an operating profit of ¥19.5 billion (£100 million, $160 million). The PS4 has taken a significant lead in the console market, massively outselling the rival Xbox One and Nintendo Wii U, the latter of which has sold just 10 million units . Sony’s devices division—which makes the camera sensors in high-end phones from Samsung and Apple— continues to grow . The unit saw a 35.1 percent increase in sales to ¥237.9 billion (£1.2 billion, $2 billion). Sales to external customers—i.e., those high-end phone makers—increased 41.2 percent year-on-year. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015

This week WordPress released the latest edition of its recurring transparency report , revealing 43 percent of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests it received have been rejected in the first six months of 2015. It’s the lowest six-month period shown in the report, though it only dates back to 2014. However, WordPress said this headline figure would be even higher if it “counted suspended sites as rejected notices.” That change in calculation would bump the WordPress DMCA denial rate to 67 percent between January 1 and June 30, 2015. In total, the publishing platform received 4,679 DMCA takedown requests as of June 30, identifying 12 percent of those as “abusive.” The top three organizations submitting these requests were Web Sheriff, Audiolock, and InternetSecurities. “Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by third party take down services, many of whom use automated bots to identify copyrighted content and generate takedown notices,” WordPress noted. The company wrote at length about this practice in April, both explaining and condemning the general procedure. “These kind of automated systems scour the Web, firing off takedown notifications where unauthorized uses of material are found—so humans don’t have to,” WordPress wrote . “Sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t always work out as smoothly in practice. Much akin to some nightmare scenario from the Terminator , sometimes the bots turn on their creators.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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So far, WordPress denied 43% of DMCA takedown requests in 2015