innovation – Page 7 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Save yourself from your OEM’s bad decisions with a clean install of Windows 8.1

Crapware is a fact of life for Windows PC buyers. Most of the time, it’s relatively harmless: limited anti-virus subscriptions you don’t want, WildTangent games, and demoware you don’t need, and Microsoft Office demos you can’t use without spending more money. Sometimes, as we’ve seen with today’s “Superfish” news , it can be actively harmful, putting users’ security at risk. With some effort, this unwanted and unsafe software can usually be uninstalled. If you have an affected Lenovo PC, we’ve outlined the multi-step process for removing the software and the root certificate here . If you want to be sure that everything is completely removed (and if you’re willing to do the work), the more comprehensive solution is to completely reinstall Windows yourself. It’s not for everyone, but there are benefits to doing it this way—you get a totally clean PC that you’re in full control over. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Save yourself from your OEM’s bad decisions with a clean install of Windows 8.1

Palm-sized pwnage: Ars tests the Pwn Plug R3

Imagine for a moment the following scenario: you’re the manager for a busy bank branch in a major city. You come back from lunch and are told by one of your employees that someone from corporate IT dropped by to check on a reported problem with a branch PC. You don’t remember putting in a trouble ticket with IT, but apparently the guy left after looking under a desk and re-plugging a network cable or something. It took less than five minutes. You think nothing of it and go back to approving loans. Three days later, you get a call from the head of corporate security, wanting to know why someone at your branch has been performing wire transfers from the accounts of customers who’ve never used your branch to accounts at offshore banks. A few hours later, you’re unplugging the bank’s network equipment while he’s shouting at you over the phone about gigabytes of corporate data being pulled down from something in your bank. And when the security team and police arrive to investigate, they find a little nondescript box plugged into a network port, connected to a broadband cellular modem. Something like this happened to banks in London last year . A man posing as an IT contractor wired networked keyboard-video-monitor (KVM) switches connected to cellular routers into PCs at two bank branches. The ring involved with the thefts was only caught because they decided to go for a third score, and their “technician” was caught in the act. The digital heists were a variation on the hacker “drop box” strategy: boldly walking into a place of business and planting a device, often hidden in plain sight, to use as a Trojan horse to gain remote access to the business’ network. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Inside Ford’s New Silicon Valley Lab

An anonymous reader writes Engadget takes a look at Ford’s new Research and Innovation Center located in Palo Alto. The company hopes to use the new facility to speed the development of projects such as autonomous cars and better natural voice recognition. From the article: “This isn’t Ford’s first dance with the Valley — it actually started its courtship several years ago when it opened its inaugural Silicon Valley office in 2012. The new center, however, is a much bigger effort, with someone new at the helm. That person is Dragos Maciuca, a former Apple engineer with significant experience in consumer electronics, semiconductors, aerospace and automotive tech. Ford also hopes to build a team of 125 professionals under Maciuca, which would make the company one of the largest dedicated automotive research teams in the Valley.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Office 2016 and Office for Windows touchscreens are due later this year

Word for Windows 10. These touch-optimized apps are separate from the desktop Office suite. 5 more images in gallery The Office tablet and phone apps for iOS and Android both ship with a touch-optimized subset of the features of the full flagship Office suite, and even though Microsoft is readying an Office release for Windows phones and tablets, the desktop version will still reign supreme. Microsoft says that the next version of the flagship suite, dubbed Office 2016, will be “generally available in the second half of 2015.” It will remain optimized for keyboards and mice. The touch-optimized Office apps for Windows 10 are still on their way, though, and Microsoft has shared some screenshots that show what the apps will look like on both phones and tablets. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook Mail, and Outlook Calendar for Windows 10 (the official product names) unsurprisingly share a lot in common with the touchscreen apps for other platforms. Microsoft released Office for iPad in March of 2014 , and that UI has served as the foundation for all the tablet versions of the suite, including the still-in-beta Android version . The phone-sized versions of the apps look more like the new iPhone versions released in November , not like the limited versions that are currently available on Windows phones. The Outlook app for Windows 10 is something we haven’t seen on other platforms yet. Microsoft has released Outlook clients for iOS and Android, but they only support business-class Office 365 accounts and are more or less just wrappers for the standard Outlook Web client. The version for Windows 10 looks more full-featured, more closely resembling the desktop version of Outlook, at least in the three-column tablet view. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Office 2016 and Office for Windows touchscreens are due later this year

Hands on with Intel’s new mini-desktops: Faster, smaller, more expandable

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—Intel released its next wave of Broadwell processors this week at CES, and PC companies are already preparing systems with the chips inside ( Lenovo’s new X1 Carbon and the new Dell XPS 13 are among our favorites so far). Intel is also taking this opportunity to refresh some of its own offerings, most notably the “Next Unit of Computing” (NUC) mini desktop PCs . NUCs exist somewhere between classic DIY computer-building projects and ready-made systems from OEMs. Intel supplies a motherboard inside of a box, and you get to pick the what RAM and SSD you want to use and install them yourself. Intel will be refreshing all of its high-to-mid-end NUCs in the next few months, and these boxes will serve both as systems for people who want a small but fairly capable PC and as a showcase for the new features in Broadwell-U. We got to see and hold the new desktops ourselves, and in addition to the expected upgrades, they bring some interesting features to the platform. A wider range of systems Andrew Cunningham The short Broadwell NUC on top of the Haswell NUC on top of the Ivy Bridge NUC. Year by year, they keep shrinking. 4 more images in gallery Intel is launching a total of seven separate NUC configurations, five that are aimed at the consumer market and two that are intended for use in businesses. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hands on with Intel’s new mini-desktops: Faster, smaller, more expandable

Harley-Davidson goes electric

Before laughing off an electric Harley, read on. BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON—On June 18, 2014, Harley-Davidson shocked the motorcycle community by announcing an electric motorcycle prototype called Project LiveWire. The Project LiveWire teaser video showed a bike screaming down route 66, emitting a sound that vaguely resembled a turbine. I could barely believe what I saw, so I immediately spent time reading comments about LiveWire—naturally, the reaction was mixed. Some gave props to Harley-Davidson for thinking outside the box; others complained “this is no Harley.” The current trend for all-electric and hybrid vehicles is to assume a “quasi-futuristic,” sci-fi-infused look that pretty much leaves convention and tradition at the curb (think Nissan Leaf). Many automotive enthusiasts don’t see a lot of “soul” or “character” in these appliance vehicles. But enter Harley-Davidson, the company known for its shaking, rumbling, chrome-clad motorcycles that go beyond machinery and extend to a lifestyle. These bikes radiate tradition, heritage, and style. A Harley-Davidson is a Harley because it has a thumping, 45-degree, v-twin, air-cooled power plant breathing through pipes that emit a signature sound. Harley power must be transmitted to the rear wheel via a rubber belt, so now the company may also offer an electric bike. Really ? The motorcycle community may need a little time to adjust. And as for my own curiosity about what it would be like to ride LiveWire, I had no idea I would find out just a few weeks later. Next-generation design The Project LiveWire engineering team uses all of the latest design, prototyping, and manufacturing expertise that Harley-Davidson developed over the last century of building v-twin motorcycles. I learned about how the LiveWire team engineered and built their ground-breaking electric bike when I talked with lead project engineer Ben Lund. Lund studied Mechanical Engineering and—as you’d expect—loves riding. He’s got multiple motorcycles spanning dirt to street. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Harley-Davidson goes electric

How to make your own bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite USB install drive

Even in the download-only era, it’s easy to make yourself offline OS X install media. Andrew Cunningham It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media . Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still good reasons to want an old, reliable USB stick. For instance, if you find yourself doing multiple installs, a USB drive may be faster than multiple downloads (especially if you use a USB 3.0 drive). Or maybe you need a recovery disk for older Macs that don’t support the Internet Recovery feature. Whatever the reason, you’re in luck, because it’s not hard to make one. As with last year , there are two ways to get it done. There’s the super easy way with the graphical user interface and the only slightly less easy way that requires some light Terminal use. Here’s what you need to get started. A Mac, duh. We’ve created Yosemite USB from both Mavericks and Yosemite, but your experience with other versions may vary. An 8GB or larger USB flash drive or an 8GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. For newer Macs, use a USB 3.0 drive—it makes things significantly faster. The OS X 10.10 Yosemite installer from the Mac App Store in your Applications folder. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary. If you want a GUI, you need the latest version of Diskmaker X app—we wrote this article based on version 4 beta 2, but if a “final” version is released alongside Yosemite we’ll update the article. This app is free to download, but the creator accepts donations if you want to support his efforts. An administrator account on the Mac you’re using to create the disk. The easy way Diskmaker X remains the easiest, most user-friendly way to get this done. Andrew Cunningham Once you’ve obtained all of the necessary materials, connect the USB drive to your Mac and run the Diskmaker X app. The app will offer to make installers for OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10, but we’re only interested in Yosemite today. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to make your own bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite USB install drive

Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook

The songbook of the damned—or at least of the employed. “For thirty-seven years,” reads the opening passage in the book, “the gatherings and conventions of our IBM workers have expressed in happy songs the fine spirit of loyal cooperation and good fellowship which has promoted the signal success of our great IBM Corporation in its truly International Service for the betterment of business and benefit to mankind.” That’s a hell of a mouthful, but it’s only the opening volley in the war on self-respect and decency that is the 1937 edition of Songs of the IBM , a booklet of corporate ditties first published in 1927 on the order of IBM company founder Thomas Watson, Sr. The 1937 edition of the songbook is a 54-page monument to glassey-eyed corporate inhumanity, with every page overflowing with trite praise to The Company and Its Men. The booklet reads like a terribly parody of a hymnal—one that praises not the traditional Christian trinity but the new corporate triumvirate of IBM the father, Watson the son, and American entrepreneurship as the holy spirit: Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tripping through IBM’s astonishingly insane 1937 corporate songbook

End of Moore’s Law Forcing Radical Innovation

dcblogs writes “The technology industry has been coasting along on steady, predictable performance gains, as laid out by Moore’s law. But stability and predictability are also the ingredients of complacency and inertia. At this stage, Moore’s Law may be more analogous to golden handcuffs than to innovation. With its end in sight, systems makers and governments are being challenged to come up with new materials and architectures. The European Commission has written of a need for ‘radical innovation in many computing technologies.’ The U.S. National Science Foundation, in a recent budget request, said technologies such as carbon nanotube digital circuits will likely be needed, or perhaps molecular-based approaches, including biologically inspired systems. The slowdown in Moore’s Law has already hit high-performance computing. Marc Snir, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory, outlined in a series of slides the problem of going below 7nm on chips, and the lack of alternative technologies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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End of Moore’s Law Forcing Radical Innovation

First US Public Library With No Paper Books Opens In Texas

cold fjord writes “Bexar Country in Texas has opened a new $2.3 million library called BiblioTech. It doesn’t have physical books, only computers and e-reader tablets. It is the first bookless public library system in the U.S. The library opened in an area without nearby bookstores, and is receiving considerable attention. It has drawn visitors from around the U.S. and overseas that are studying the concept for their own use. It appears that the library will have more than 100, 000 visitors by year’s end. Going without physical books has been cost effective from an architecture standpoint, since the building doesn’t have to support the weight of books and bookshelves. A new, smaller library in a nearby town cost $1 million more than Bexar Country’s new library. So far there doesn’t appear to be a problem with returning checked out e-readers. A new state law in Texas defines the failure to return library books as theft.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First US Public Library With No Paper Books Opens In Texas