golf – Page 50 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Intel CEO: Delayed next-gen Broadwell CPUs will be here for holidays

One of the few looks we’ve gotten at a Broadwell CPU so far. Intel New CPUs and chipsets from Intel normally go hand-in-hand, but earlier this month when the company announced its 9-series chipsets , all we got was a slightly faster clock speed bump to Haswell . News of truly new CPUs based on the upcoming “Broadwell” architecture was nowhere to be found, and we’ve generally heard very little about Broadwell aside from an announcement of a delay into the second half of 2014. There are many months in the second half of 2014, but Intel CEO Bryan Krzanich got a little more specific in a statement to Reuters today . “I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday,” said Krzanich. “Back to school—that’s a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That’s going to be tough.” This means we’ll most likely see Broadwell chips (and, more importantly, new devices from OEMs that can use Broadwell chips) sometime between September and early December. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple releases OS X 10.9.3 with improved 4K support, restored USB sync

Fire up your updaters—there’s a slightly newer and better version of OS X in town. Andrew Cunningham Following its usual months-long testing process, Apple released OS X version 10.9.3 to the general public today. The third major update to the operating system provides the usual blend of security patches, bug fixes, new (and restored) features, and future-proofing enhancements. As was discovered shortly after the first 10.9.3 beta was released, the new update improves 4K display support specifically on the 2013 Mac Pro and the 15-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro. When those computers are connected to a 4K display, they should be able to display images in OS X’s HiDPI “Retina” scaling mode by default, and they should support the faster 60Hz refresh rate on compatible monitors. “Retina” mode will make on-screen images larger and sharper, while the refresh rate increase will make UI animations, videos, and games look and feel smoother and more responsive (provided the GPU is capable of rendering them at 60 frames per second in the first place). Though the 13-inch 2013 Retina MacBook Pro has the hardware it needs to drive similar 4K displays—a Thunderbolt 2 port with DisplayPort 1.2 support and one of Intel’s Iris 5100 GPUs—that specific computer is not mentioned in Apple’s release notes. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Excerpt from:
Apple releases OS X 10.9.3 with improved 4K support, restored USB sync

Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Samsung We’ve previously talked about Samsung’s “flood the market” strategy for phones, but the company applies the same tactic to tablets, too. After releasing the Note 10.1 seven months ago and an entire line of NotePro and TabPro tablets in February, the company has announced yet another tablet event planned for June 12. According to the invite, this event is for the Samsung Galaxy Tab line. While it’s frankly getting harder and harder to try to nail down just what tablet goes where in the Samsung spectrum (which one is the flagship?) the Tabs are usually the mid-range/mainstream devices. This event location would suggest otherwise, though, as it’s being held in The Theater at Madison Square Garden, the former site of the NFL Draft. The event will even be livestreamed on Samsung’s YouTube channel . Rumor has it that this run of tablets will be the first to incorporate Samsung’s AMOLED displays. Samsung’s AMOLED manufacturing has so far not been up to the task of producing a panel large enough or cheaply enough to fit into a tablet, forcing the company’s older devices to use LCDs. Samsung’s AMOLED panels on phones are so mature that it’s difficult to tell the difference between them and LCD, so we aren’t sure how significant this change will be to consumers. The invite seems to confirm the change to AMOLED displays, which shows a top-down view of the new tablets with light gushing from the screen onto the colored background. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

New planet-hunting hardware needs just a minute to image an exoplanet

PNAS Most of the exoplanets we’ve detected have been spotted during transits, when they pass between their host star and Earth. Almost all the others have been inferred based on the fact that they gravitationally tug at their host star as they orbit around it. Very few exoplanets have been imaged directly, but that may be about to change. Earlier this week, scientists revealed the first images taken with a new instrument, the Gemini Planet Hunter, which has been installed on the (you guessed it) Gemini South telescope located in the Chilean Andes. The new hardware is so efficient that a known exoplanet that once took over an hour and considerable post-processing to image was apparent in a one-minute exposure, with no processing needed. The twin Gemini telescopes (Gemini North is in Hawaii to image the northern sky) are already some of the most advanced hardware on the planet, featuring adaptive optics that correct the gaze of an eight-meter mirror. But directly imaging a planet is a distinct challenge due to the relative brightness of the planet relative to the host star. In terms of our own Solar System, Jupiter would appear 10 9 times fainter than the Sun when imaged at a distance. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service “vital” to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM . “PRISM has a new collection capability: Skype stored communications,” a previously confidential NSA memo from 2013 declared. “Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection.” The data includes buddy lists, credit card information, call records, user account data, and “other material” that is of value to the NSA’s special source operations. The memo, which was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released Tuesday by Glenn Greenwald to coincide with the publication of his book No Place to Hide , said the FBI’s Electronic Communications Surveillance Unit had approved “over 30 selectors to be sent to Skype for collection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

If you’re a news junky, you probably use an RSS reader like Feed.ly to keep up with stuff on the Web. One of the nicest ways to consume YouTube subscriptions was to use an RSS feed of new videos, allowing them to show up just like news articles do. You might not have noticed yet, but Google quietly shut down this feature a few days ago. The RSS feed, which used to be http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/[username]/newsubscriptionvideos, now throws out a “403 Forbidden” error. Previously, the URL would provide a publicly accessible feed of new subscriptions from any YouTube account, provided users didn’t choose to turn off public subscription retrieval. The feed was part of the YouTube Data API v2, which was deprecated in March of this year. The replacement—predictably named YouTube Data API v3—doesn’t offer a comparable data stream. Bug reports filed for this regression as early as January 2013 have gone unanswered, save for a single response in January 2014 (yes, a year later) saying, “Patch is in the works, however we can’t comment on the expected date.” Now it’s five months later, the feature is gone, and there’s no solution in sight. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more

At TechEd in Houston today, Microsoft announced a wide range of updates to its Azure cloud platform. As has become customary for Azure updates, the new features announced today include a mix of previews of brand-new capabilities, and general availability releases of features previously only in preview. In the general availability bucket are a set of new networking options for connectivity to Azure. Currently, Azure users connect to Azure through a mix of public Internet addresses and private VPNs, with all traffic going over the Internet. The new ExpressRoute capability provides a third option: direct private connections to Azure, either through exchange providers, or by connecting Azure to existing corporate WANs. ExpressRoute will be offered with a 99.9 percent SLA and four bandwidth tiers: 200Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, and 10Gbps. Though now generally available, the connectivity is currently limited to connections via two US sites—Silicon Valley and Washington, DC—and London. Microsoft intends to make it available in 13 further locations by the end of the year. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Microsoft boosts cloud security, network performance, compute power, and more

Four weeks on, huge swaths of the Internet remain vulnerable to Heartbleed

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock More than four weeks after the disclosure of the so-called Heartbleed bug found in a widely used cryptography package , slightly more or slightly less than half the systems affected by the catastrophic flaw remain vulnerable, according to two recently released estimates. A scan performed last month by Errata Security CEO Rob Graham found 615,268 servers that indicated they were vulnerable to attacks that could steal passwords, other types of login credentials, and even the extremely sensitive private encryption keys that allow attackers to impersonate websites or monitor encrypted traffic. On Thursday, the number stood at 318,239. Graham said his scans counted only servers running vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL crypto library that enabled the “Heartbeat” feature where the critical flaw resides. A separate scan using slightly different metrics arrived at an estimate that slightly less than half of the servers believed to be vulnerable in the days immediately following the Heartbleed disclosure remain susceptible. Using a tool the researcher yngve called TLS Prober, he found that 5.36 percent of all servers were vulnerable to Heartbleed as of April 11, four days after Heartbleed came to light. In a blog post published Wednesday , he said 2.33 percent of servers remained vulnerable. It’s important to remember the results don’t include the number of Heartbleed-vulnerable servers providing services such a virtual private networks or e-mail. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Four weeks on, huge swaths of the Internet remain vulnerable to Heartbleed

Intel and Google boast 11-hour battery life with upcoming Chromebooks

Intel Intel Intel likes Chrome OS. Need proof? The company is apparently the number-two contributor to the operating system’s code after Google itself. Intel and Google also co-hosted a small event in San Francisco today, intended to highlight Intel’s commitment to Chrome OS and the number of PC OEMs that are shipping Intel-equipped Chromebooks. Many of Intel and Google’s announcements were about products we already knew about: there’s a multi-colored HP Chromebox coming in June for an as-yet-undisclosed price, and LG’s Chromebase all-in-one will be here later this month for $349. Both Acer and Dell are also tweaking their existing 11-inch Chromebooks, providing a faster Core i3 CPU option to complement the lower-end Celeron offerings. The Acer version will cost $349 when it launches later in the summer, while the Dell model will ship later in the year. Intel and Google started by telling us more about Chrome devices we’ve already met. Intel The truly new Chromebooks announced at the presentation used Intel’s Bay Trail platform rather than the more common Haswell chips. These gadgets share a number of characteristics: like the ARM Chromebooks we’ve seen so far, they’re fanless. Intel says they’ll run for “up to” 11 hours, compared to around 10 hours for Haswell designs, and they’ll include Intel’s 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapters instead of the single- and dual-band 802.11n adapters most current Chromebooks use. Bay Trail Chromebooks are going to give up a significant amount of CPU and GPU performance compared to even the slowest Haswell chips, but the other benefits may outweigh that hit. Bay Trail comes to Chromebooks. Intel Asus, Acer, Toshiba, and Lenovo will be the first PC OEMs to ship Bay Trail-based Chromebooks, not counting a basic education-focused reference design that Intel showed off during the presentation. Asus is offering both 11-inch (C200) and 13-inch (C300) Bay Trail Chromebooks with dual-core Bay Trail Celeron chips (the N2830 , to be exact), 2GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, 1366×768 displays, and 802.11ac. The 11-inch model weighs 2.5 pounds, while the 13-inch model is 3.1 pounds, and the lineup will reportedly start at $250 . The Toshiba and Acer models weren’t shown, and we don’t yet know anything about specific specifications, pricing, or availability for either of them. Lenovo’s Chromebooks are a little more intriguing . The company is offering two models, the N20 and the N20p. Both use 11.6-inch 1366×768 displays, quad-core Bay Trail Celeron chips, 2GB or 4GB of RAM, 16GB of solid-state storage, and about eight hours of battery life. The difference between the two is that the N20p integrates a Yoga-like flexible hinge and a touchscreen that can be flipped backward (though it won’t sit flush against the bottom of the laptop like the regular Yogas will). The standard N20 will start at $279 when it’s available in July, and the N20p will start at $329 in August. The event also played up Chrome OS’ momentum in the marketplace, though no one who spoke used specific sales numbers. They chose instead to focus on other metrics—that seven of the top 20 best-selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks, that the Asus Chromebox has been the best-selling desktop on Amazon since it was introduced, and that Amazon customer reviews on these devices are generally favorable. Eight major PC OEMs are now selling Chrome OS devices, and they’re available in 20 countries (with nine more countries to follow). Chromebooks were initially available from just two PC OEMs, but six more have since joined them. Intel The Q&A session with representatives from Acer, Lenovo, Dell, and Google yielded few substantive answers to the most interesting questions. Can we expect a Chrome OS tablet, as has occasionally been rumored ? Are any of the OEMs planning to build a machine more like the Chromebook Pixel and less like a netbook? What about Chromebooks with larger screens since most of the current crop includes 11.6-inch panels? The reps would only give some version of “we’re always evaluating new form factors” before moving on. Even if the computers highlighted and announced today aren’t mind-blowing individually, the breadth and variety of the Chrome OS ecosystem as a whole has become quite impressive in the last two years. There’s still a conspicuous gap between the Acer C720 and HP Chromebook 11 at the bottom of the laptop pile and the Chromebook Pixel at the top of it, but as of this summer Chrome OS will come in pretty much any form factor you could want. In 2011 all we had were a couple of lackluster netbooks that retailed for $499 . Now you can even grab touch-enabled laptops, mini desktops, and all-in-ones for well below that price. All we need to do is wait another couple of years to see whether this is the birth of a vibrant new post-PC ecosystem or a netbook-style gold rush. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Read this article:
Intel and Google boast 11-hour battery life with upcoming Chromebooks

ARM: The $20 smartphone will be possible “in the next few months”

Basic smartphones are cheap—and getting cheaper. ARM Smartphone prices have been creeping ever downward in the last few years, and ARM is betting that they’re going to go even lower. AnandTech is reporting from ARM’s Tech Day today , and one of the company’s slides predicts that the cost of a phone with a single-core Cortex A5 chip in it will go as low as $20 within the next few months. Of course, these ultra-low-cost phones won’t be devices tech enthusiasts lust after. ARM notes that even a $25 phone like the Firefox handsets announced at Mobile World Congress have to cut down on RAM and other specs to hit that price point, and it’s unlikely that something with such low specs could run something like Android satisfactorily. More expensive phones like the $179 Moto G will still be necessary if you want that full smartphone experience on a budget. Still, for those ever-important emerging markets where the smartphone has yet to take off, any OEM that can provide a decent experience for this price is going to fill an important niche. In other news from ARM’s Tech Day, ARM shared some new performance estimates for its upcoming 64-bit Cortex A53 and A57 architectures. The company predicts that chips based on these architectures will be about 1.5 times as fast as the Cortex A7 and A15 architectures they replace when the SoCs are all built on the same 28nm manufacturing process. When moved to a newer 20nm or 16nm manufacturing process, though, the A57 in particular will supposedly be nearly twice as fast as the older A15. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
ARM: The $20 smartphone will be possible “in the next few months”