Tag: glamour-golf

Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste

Step one: incite panic. MyCleanPC.com Maybe you’ve seen the ads on the Internet or on TV in the wee hours of the morning. They make lofty promises: get rid of blue screens and error messages! Increase your speed! Clean up your system! But even when these PC cleanup apps aren’t just malware in disguise, the things they’re doing for your PC are often dubious. Many either replicate tasks that can be handled by built-in utilities or do things that could cause more problems than they solve. To highlight just why you and your loved ones should never let these applications anywhere near your PC, we picked one that we’d recently seen ads for: MyCleanPC. It’s the archetypal Windows cleanup app—and you probably shouldn’t install it. Intimidation tactics The standard ad for a PC cleanup app follows the same basic format as this ad from MyCleanPC.com . These ads for PC cleanup products often follow the same basic formula: appeal to people with slow or buggy PCs, throw in a few shots of an operating system that looks kind of like Windows, tack on some “customer testimonials,” and offer a free diagnosis that will make all the problems go away. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste

MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

The general approach to storing a binary file as DNA, described in detail below. Goldman et al., Nature It’s easy to get excited about the idea of encoding information in single molecules, which seems to be the ultimate end of the miniaturization that has been driving the electronics industry. But it’s also easy to forget that we’ve been beaten there—by a few billion years. The chemical information present in biomolecules was critical to the origin of life and probably dates back to whatever interesting chemical reactions preceded it. It’s only within the past few decades, however, that humans have learned to speak DNA. Even then, it took a while to develop the technology needed to synthesize and determine the sequence of large populations of molecules. But we’re there now, and people have started experimenting with putting binary data in biological form. Now, a new study has confirmed the flexibility of the approach by encoding everything from an MP3 to the decoding algorithm into fragments of DNA. The cost analysis done by the authors suggest that the technology may soon be suitable for decade-scale storage, provided current trends continue. Trinary encoding Computer data is in binary, while each location in a DNA molecule can hold any one of four bases (A, T, C, and G). Rather than using all that extra information capacity, however, the authors used it to avoid a technical problem. Stretches of a single type of base (say, TTTTT) are often not sequenced properly by current techniques—in fact, this was the biggest source of errors in the previous DNA data storage effort. So for this new encoding, they used one of the bases to break up long runs of any of the other three. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

Wires smaller in diameter than light waves boost solar cell efficiency

Electron micrograph of indium phosphide (InP) nanowires. Each is 180 nanometers in diameter; this diameter allows them to capture more light, making them effective in a photovoltaic solar cell. Wallentin et al. In the continuing quest to create solar cells, researchers seek new materials, use clever techniques, and look for novel physical phenomena to extract the maximum electricity out of sunlight for the lowest cost. One method of extracting more power at a lower cost relies on creating arrays of nanowires that stand vertically on inexpensive substrates. In contrast to the material in ordinary solar cells, nanowires use less material, can potentially be built with less costly materials, and in principle trap more light thanks to the geometry of the arrays. However, most nanowire solar cells are currently outperformed by their conventional counterparts. A new effort used indium phosphide (InP) nanowires with diameters smaller than the wavelength of the light they were trapping. That trick enabled Jesper Wallentin and colleagues to reach comparable efficiencies and slightly higher voltage than a conventional InP solar cell. While the wires only covered 12 percent of the surface area, they exploited a principle known as resonant trapping to extract over half as much current as a full planar cell of InP. This approach could lead to even greater efficiency at lower cost for solar cells. Many candidates for the next generation of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells are being investigated. Research in this area has two goals that don’t always overlap: maximizing the efficiency of converting sunlight into electric current, and reducing cost per unit of electricity. The advantage of nanowire-based cells lies in using a lot less material, since the entire surface need not be covered in PV material. Additionally, the wires themselves can be fabricated from relatively inexpensive semiconductor materials. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wires smaller in diameter than light waves boost solar cell efficiency

Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Not to be outdone by Nvidia’s Tegra 4 announcement and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800-series announcement, Samsung took to the stage today to announce the next processor in its Exynos 5 lineup: the Exynos 5 Octa is an eight-core SoC destined for tablets and high-end smartphones. Not all of these CPU cores are created equal: four of them are high-performance Cortex-A15 cores, the very same found in the Exynos 5 Dual that powers the Nexus 10 and Samsung’s ARM Chromebook . The other four are Cortex-A7 CPU cores—these have the same feature set and capabilities as the A15 cores, but are optimized for power efficiency rather than performance. This makes the Exynos 5 Octa one of the first (if not  the first) products to actually use ARM’s big.LITTLE processor switching technology, something we outlined back in October of 2011 . The SoC is designed to dynamically split the workload between the high-performance and the high-efficiency CPU cores based on the task at hand—less strenuous activities like browsing an app store or checking e-mail might be done on the A7 cores, for instance, while gaming and number crunching could be handed off to the A15 cores. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s new eight-core Exynos 5 Octa SoC promises not to hog battery

Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Starting this Friday, Walmart will be selling the iPhone for use with wireless provider Straight Talk, which is offering a $45-per-month contract with unlimited voice, data, and texting. This sale will make it one of the cheapest ways —as measured over a two-year period—to get a prepaid iPhone. Walmart says it will offer $25-per-month financing for the phone itself if customers use a Walmart credit card. Straight Talk, which uses AT&T’s towers as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), is becoming an increasingly popular option for prepaid customers who want to use an iPhone without paying high prices. (Full disclosure: I am a Straight Talk customer, and have been since April 2012.) “We believe customers shouldn’t have to choose between saving money and having the latest technology,” said Seong Ohm, senior vice president of Entertainment for Walmart US, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Now customers can have the coveted iPhone with unlimited talk, text, and data without a contract for $70 a month thanks to our exclusive Straight Talk plan and industry first financing offer.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Walmart to sell iPhones with a $45 per month unlimited prepaid plan

Windows 8 sales are good, if not great, at 40 million copies in the first month

Tami Reller, corporate vice president (and chief financial officer and chief marketing officer) for Windows and Windows Live, announced today that Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses after its first month of retail availability. Is that number good, bad, or merely mediocre? Probably good, but perhaps not great. Microsoft sold 60 million copies of Windows 7 in the first ten weeks of that operating system’s availability, with the Wall Street Journal estimating that 40 million copies were sold in the first month. With Windows 8 selling 40 million copies in five weeks, it seems to be selling at about the same pace as Windows 7. Considering the different market dynamics—Windows 7 was an iterative release that fulfilled substantial pent-up demand as businesses chose to ignore Windows Vista whereas Windows 8 is a more controversial update being brought to a market that is generally happy with Windows 7 anyway—this is a healthy performance. Windows 7 sold very well and matching it is no mean feat. The apparent failure to surpass Windows 7’s launch could explain the mixed reports on early sales. Strong sales can still be disappointing if they were expected to be stronger still. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 8 sales are good, if not great, at 40 million copies in the first month

Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulhami/ Imagine you’re launching a company and only have six months to deliver a product. You face a competitor that has been in your industry four years longer than you with twice your staff and twice the budget. If you don’t make your deadline, you’re out of business. That, in a nutshell, was the situation facing the technology team for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. The Obama for America (OFA) organization had the advantage: it didn’t have to wade through the primary season first, allowing OFA’s technology team to focus on building an infrastructure. Based on an Ars analysis of the Romney campaign’s financial reports, Romney’s team had less to work with and passed the lion’s share of technology-focused spending directly to advertising companies and telemarketers. This left Team Romney’s tech squad with only a fraction of the budget for consulting, services, and infrastructure. So, the campaign did what a lot of small businesses would do: they went to Best Buy. Or more accurately, they went to Best Buy’s subsidiary, MindShift Technologies, a managed service provider that specializes in small and medium business consulting. And when they were in a pinch for tech help, they called Staples’ subsidiary ThriveNetworks and a collection of small consulting firms with links to Romney and the Republican Party. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends

Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8

Windows 8’s most obvious—and most divisive—new feature is its user interface . However, it would be a mistake to think that the user interface is the only thing that’s new in Windows 8: there’s a lot that’s changed behind the scenes, too. Just as is the case with the user interface, many of the improvements made to the Windows 8 core are motivated by Microsoft’s desire to transform Windows into an effective tablet operating system. Even those of us with no interest at all in tablets can stand to take advantage of these changes, however. For example, Windows 8 is more power efficient and uses less memory than Windows 7; while such work is critical to getting the software to run well on low-memory tablets with all-day battery life, it’s equally advantageous for laptop users. The biggest single piece of technology that is new to Windows 8 is, however, squarely Metro focused: it’s a large set of libraries and components called WinRT. I’ve already written extensively about what WinRT is, so I won’t be getting into that here, but there are system capabilities that WinRT apps can use (or are forced to use) that are interesting in their own right. Read 77 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Better on the inside: under the hood of Windows 8

Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works

Windows Home Server was never a particularly popular product, but it did bring some interesting features to the table for the few who used it and became fans. One of these features was called Drive Extender, and its claim to fame was that it allowed users to pool their system’s hard drives so that they were seen by the operating system as one large hard drive. This obviated the need to keep track of the amount of free space across several disks, and it also allowed users to automatically mirror their data to multiple disks at once, keeping their files safe in the event of drive failure. Microsoft killed Drive Extender not long before pulling the plug on the Windows Home Server entirely , but the intent behind it lives on in Windows 8’s new Storage Spaces feature: “Storage Spaces is not intended to be a feature-by-feature replacement for that specialized solution,” wrote Microsoft’s Rajeev Nagar in a blog post introducing the feature, “but it does deliver on many of its core requirements.” In essence, Storage Spaces takes most of Drive Extender’s underlying functionality and implements it in a way that is more technically sound; early versions of Drive Extender sometimes corrupted data when copying files between drives and mangled file metadata, but the underlying filesystem improvements made to support Storage Spaces should make it much more robust, at least in theory. Read 40 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works

Dept. of Veterans Affairs spent millions on PC software it couldn’t use

Rolling out new software to a few thousand users is an involved process for any organization. But installing software that affects hundreds of thousands of PCs as part of a response to a data breach while under embarrassing scrutiny is a task that would challenge even the most well-managed IT departments. And, apparently, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ answer to that challenge was to sweep it under the rug. After removable hard disks containing unencrypted personal identifying information of  26 million military veterans  were stolen from the home of a VA employee in 2006, then-Secretary of Veterans Affairs   R. James Nicholson mandated that the VA’s Office of Information Technology install encryption software on all of the department’s notebook and desktop computers. But while the VA purchased 400,000 licensees for Symantec’s Guardian Edge encryption software, more than 84 percent of those licenses—worth about $5.1 million, including the maintenance contracts for them—remain uninstalled, a  VA Inspector General’s audit  has found. The VA’s OIT purchased 300,000 licenses and maintenance agreements for Guardian Edge in 2006 and continued to pay for maintenance on those licenses for the next five years. And in 2011, the VA purchased 100,000 more software licenses from Symantec and extended maintenance on all 400,000 licenses for two years. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Dept. of Veterans Affairs spent millions on PC software it couldn’t use