AmiMoJo quotes a report from NHK WORLD: Japanese electronics maker Panasonic says it will stop making LCD panels for televisions, giving way to fierce price competition. The pullout from TV LCD manufacturing follows the company’s withdrawal from plasma TV production 3 years ago. They say they will continue to manufacture LCD panels at the plant for products other than televisions, such as medical equipment and cars. They say the company will keep making Panasonic-brand televisions, using panels supplied by other manufacturers. After Panasonic pulls out, Sharp and its Taiwanese parent firm Hon Hai will be the only producer in Japan. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Samsung Starts Mass Producing New 512GB NVMe SSD That’s Smaller Than a Stamp
An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Samsung announced late Monday night that it has begun mass producing a new SSD that is tinier than a postage stamp. PCWorld reports: “The PM971-NVMe fits up to 512GB of NAND flash, a controller, and RAM into a single BGA chip measuring 20mm x 16mm x 1.5mm and weighing just one gram, the company said. Samsung says the PM971-NVMe will hit 1.5GBps read speeds and 800MBps write speeds. The PM971-NVMe is built using 20nm NAND chips and includes 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM as a cache. The NAND is triple-level cell but uses a portion as a write butter. The drive will come in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB capacities.” While on the topic of hardware, Intel unveiled its Broadwell-E family, which consists of an “Extreme Edition” Core i7 chipset that has 10 cores and 20 threads. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Samsung Starts Mass Producing New 512GB NVMe SSD That’s Smaller Than a Stamp
Hackers Claim to Have 427 Million Myspace Passwords
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: There’s an oft-repeated adage in the world of cybersecurity: There are two types of companies, those that have been hacked, and those that don’t yet know they have been hacked. MySpace, the social media behemoth that was, is apparently in the second category. The same hacker who was selling the data of more than 164 million LinkedIn users last week now claims to have 360 million emails and passwords of MySpace users, which would be one of the largest leaks of passwords ever. And it looks like the data is being circulated in the underground by other hackers as well. It’s unclear when the data was stolen from MySpace, but both the hacker, who’s known as Peace, and one of the operators of LeakedSource, a paid hacked data search engine that also claims to have the credentials, said it’s from a past, unreported, breach. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hackers Claim to Have 427 Million Myspace Passwords
FCC Formalizes Massive Fines For Selling, Using Cell-Phone Jammers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: Two years ago the FCC announced its intention to fine a Chinese electronics maker $34.9 million and a Florida man $48, 000 for respectively selling and using illegal cell-phone jammers. Today the agency has issued press releases telling us that those fines have finally been made official, without either of the offending parties having bothered to mount a formal defense of their actions. From the press release announcing the fine against CTS. Technology: ” The company’s website falsely claimed that some jammers had been approved by the FCC, and advertised that the company could ship signal jammers to consumers in the United States.” The company did not respond to the FCC’s allegations, although the agency does report that changes were made to its website that appear to be aimed at complying with U.S. law. Next up is Florida man, Jason R. Humphreys, who is alleged to have used a jammer on his commute: “Mr. Humphreys’ illegal operation of the jammer continued for up to two years, caused interference to cellular service along Interstate 4, and disrupted police communications.” Last Fall, a Chicagoan was arrested for using a cell-phone jammer to make his subway commute more tolerable. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FCC Formalizes Massive Fines For Selling, Using Cell-Phone Jammers
Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year
Danny Sullivan, reporting for Search Engine Land: How many searches per year happen on Google? After nearly four years, the company has finally released an updated figure today of “trillions” per year. How many trillions, exactly, Google wouldn’t say. Consider two trillion the starting point. Google did confirm to Search Engine Land that because it said it handles “trillions” of searches per year worldwide, the figure could be safely assumed to be two trillion or above. Is it more than two trillion? Google could be doing five trillion searches per year. Or 10 trillion. Or 100 trillion. Or presumably up to 999 trillion, because if it were 1, 000 trillion, you’d expect Google would announce that it does a quadrillion searches per year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year
Superjet Technology Nears Reality After Successful Australia Test
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: A two-hour flight from Sydney to London is a step closer to reality after the latest successful test Wednesday of hypersonic technology in the Australian desert. A joint US-Australian military research team is running a series of 10 trials at the world’s largest land testing range, Woomera in South Australia, and at Norway’s Andoya Rocket Range. Hypersonic flight involves traveling at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5). Scientists involved in the program — called Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HIFiRE) — are developing an engine that can fly at Mach 7, Michael Smart of the University of Queensland told AFP. He added that the scramjet was a supersonic combustion engine that uses oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel, making it lighter and faster than fuel-carrying rockets. The experimental rocket in the trial on Wednesday reached an altitude of 278 kilometers and a target speed of Mach 7.5, Australia’s defense department said. The first test of the rocket was conducted in 2009. The next test is scheduled for 2017 with the project expected to be completed in 2018. It’s only a matter of time before such high-speed transportation technology is implemented into our infrastructure. Last week, Hyperloop One conducted a successful test of its high speed transportation technology in the desert outside Las Vegas. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Superjet Technology Nears Reality After Successful Australia Test
Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Google’s low-cost Chromebooks outsold Apple’s range of Macs for the first time in the U.S. recently. IDC analyst Linn Huang confirmed the milestone to The Verge. “Chrome OS overtook Mac OS in the US in terms of shipments for the first time in 1Q16, ” says Huang. “Chromebooks are still largely a US K-12 story.” IDC estimates Apple’s U.S. Mac shipments to be around 1.76 million in the latest quarter, meaning Dell, HP, and Lenovo sold nearly 2 million Chromebooks in Q1 combined. Chromebooks have been extremely popular in US schools, and it’s clear from IDC’s comments the demand is driving US shipments. Outside of the US, it’s still unclear exactly how well Google’s low-cost laptops are doing. Most data from market research firms like IDC and Gartner focuses solely on Google’s wins in the US. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US
Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore’s Law 7 Years Into The Future
An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Google says its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. “TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA, ” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday. The chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, world champion of the game called Go. “We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law), ” said Google’s blog post. “TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly.” The chip is called the Tensor Processing Unit because it underpins TensorFlow, the software engine that powers its deep learning services under an open-source license. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore’s Law 7 Years Into The Future
Backblaze Releases Billion-Hour Hard Drive Reliability Report
jones_supa writes: The storage services provider Backblaze has released its reliability report for Q1/2016 covering cumulative failure rates of mechanical hard disk drives by specific model numbers and by manufacturer. The company noted that as of this quarter, its 60, 000 drives have cumulatively spun for over one billion hours (100, 000 years). Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) is the clear leader here, with an annual failure rate of just 1% for three years running. The second position is also taken by a Japanese company: Toshiba. Third place goes to Western Digital (WD), with the company’s ratings having improved in the past year. Seagate comes out the worst, though it is suspected that much of that rating was warped by the company’s crash-happy 3 TB drive (ST3000DM001). Backblaze notes that 4 TB drives continue to be the sweet spot for building out its storage pods, but that it might move to 6, 8, or 10 TB drives as the price on the hardware comes down. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Backblaze Releases Billion-Hour Hard Drive Reliability Report
Netflix Launches Fast.com To Show How Fast Your Internet Connection Really Is
Paul Sawers, writing for VentureBeat (condensed): Netflix really wants to show you how fast (or slow) your Internet connection is, and to do so it has launched a new website at Fast.com that conveys the real-time speed of your connection to the Web. It’s designed to give people “greater insight and control of their Internet service.” Netflix said it was for: Providing a website featuring non-downloadable software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user’s Internet connection, as well as downloadable computer software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user’s Internet connection.Compared to Speedtest.net, Fast.com doesn’t offer any details on how fast is your upload speeds, what’s the ping time, and any detail on location and ISP. However, it’s seemingly faster, and automatically detects your download speeds when you visit the website. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Netflix Launches Fast.com To Show How Fast Your Internet Connection Really Is