Siri Actually Cares How Names Are Pronounced in iOS 7

In iOS 7, Siri’s voice is becoming less robotic and more human (we’ll have to wait and see if she’s more useful). One of those improvements will be how she pronounces names. Instead of butchering your name or choppily spelling out letters of your friends’ names, she’ll be able to be ‘taught’ what the correct pronunciation is. Read more…        

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Siri Actually Cares How Names Are Pronounced in iOS 7

Clever Uses for Facebook Graph Search

It’s been several months since Facebook introduced Graph Search , and if you have it, you may be wondering what it’s good for. The short answer: A lot of things! Here are some clever ways to make use of Graph Search if you already have it, and some reasons to sign up to get it if you don’t have it already. Read more…        

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Clever Uses for Facebook Graph Search

How Facebook Uses Your Data to Target Ads, Even Offline

If you feel like Facebook has more ads than usual, you aren’t imagining it: Facebook’s been inundating us with more and more ads lately, and using your information—both online and offline —to do it. Here’s how it works, and how you can opt out. More »        

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How Facebook Uses Your Data to Target Ads, Even Offline

A 50 Gbps Connection With Multipath TCP

First time accepted submitter Olivier Bonaventure writes “The TCP protocol is closely coupled with the underlying IP protocol. Once a TCP connection has been established through one IP address, the other packets of the connection must be sent from this address. This makes mobility and load balancing difficult. Multipath TCP is a new extension that solves these old problems by decoupling TCP from the underlying IP. A Multipath TCP connection can send packets over several interfaces/addresses simultaneously while remaining backward compatible with existing TCP applications. Multipath TCP has several use cases, including smartphones that can use both WiFi and 3G, or servers that can pool multiple high-speed interfaces. Christoph Paasch, Gregory Detal and their colleagues who develop the implementation of Multipath TCP in the Linux kernel have achieved 50 Gbps for a single TCP connection [note: link has source code and technical details] by pooling together six 10 Gbps interfaces.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A 50 Gbps Connection With Multipath TCP

Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps

An anonymous reader writes “Tom’s Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new “Haswell” CPUs from Intel. It’s just a performance preview, but it isn’t just more of the same. While it’s got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing.” The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps

StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Released

Today Blizzard launched its first expansion to StarCraft 2, titled Heart of the Swarm. When initially developing StarCraft 2, Blizzard made the decision to split the game into three parts, each with a campaign as long as the original StarCraft. The initial release in 2010, Wings of Liberty, centered on the story of the Terrans. The newly-released Heart of the Swarm is focused on the Zerg. The final release, Legacy of the Void, will dedicate its campaign to the Protoss (and does not have a projected release timeframe yet). In addition to the new campaign, new units have been introduced for multiplayer and new maps have been added, which ought to shake things up in the competitive landscape. Blizzard has also made long-awaited improvements to the social system, including support for groups and clans. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Released

Facebook’s New News Feed: The Biggest Change In Years

The last time Zuck overhauled the website you check all day every day was two years ago. Two! You’ve probably changed a decent amount since then, but Facebook hasn’t in a way that’s done anything but make us cringe—until today. Enter the clutter killer. Here’s how you’ll be stalking the universe now. More »

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Facebook’s New News Feed: The Biggest Change In Years

Gaikai Cloud Gaming In PlayStation 4 Brings Easy Free Trials Of Games, Sharing, Spectating And Remote Play

Gaikai’s Dave Perry took the stage at the PS4 event today to describe how Gaikai would be adding cloud gaming elements to the PS4, which will make it possible to jump in and try games in the PlayStation store, make sharing with your friends a snap, and also invite spectators and get friends to help you by remotely taking over your game. The PS Vita will also finally get a lot more useful, thanks to Remote Play. Perry said that the team has dramatically reduced transmission times, turning the PS4 into a server and the Vita into a client allowing for remote play of titles run on the PS4 direct to the Vita. It’s exactly like the Wii U, but with a controller you can walk away with and use as a standalone mobile console. The ability to easily jump right into PS4 games and try out titles via streamed gaming is a huge addition for Sony, which had more limited demo capability in the PS3 PlayStation store which required sizeable downloads when it was even available (which wasn’t for every title). Inviting players to join and watch your game also includes the ability for spectators to chim with with on-screen comments as you play, and the ability to take over your controller to help you out if you run into trouble. It’s a much more social version of Nintendo’s handholding modes in recent releases. Will gamers opt to call a friend, so to speak, instead of jumping on GameFAQs? That’s a good question, but clearly the company is doing everything it can to try and build a real social network, instead of the loosely affiliated group of often crude, sometimes racist anonymized gamers that made up the PlayStation Network of the past.

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Gaikai Cloud Gaming In PlayStation 4 Brings Easy Free Trials Of Games, Sharing, Spectating And Remote Play