Distraction-free writing software is one of those things that seems unlikely to ever go away, despite the fact that I’m willing to bet 90 percent of users who buy it use it once and never again. A new hardware startup out of Detroit is hoping that a physical solution might help users focus on the writing, in much the same way e-readers allow people to focus on books without getting… Read More
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Hemingwrite Modernizes The Typewriter With An E-Ink Screen And Cloud Storage
CoolChip Technologies is a startup working to redesign fans to be less of a nuisance. While there are alternatives (like liquid cooling) for those who simply cannot stand the presence of fans, CoolChip’s work doesn’t require significantly changing a machine’s internal layout. Read More
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CoolChip Technologies Is Redesigning The Humble Computer Fan
MojoKid writes: AMD just dropped its new Catalyst Omega driver package that is the culmination of six months of development work. AMD Catalyst Omega reportedly brings over 20 new features and a wealth of bug fixes to the table, along with performance increases both on AMD Radeon GPUs and integrated AMD APUs. Some of the new functionality includes Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR. VSR is “game- and engine-agnostic” and renders content at up to 4K resolution, then displays it at a resolution that your monitor actually supports. AMD says VSR allows for increased image quality, similar in concept to Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). Another added perk of VSR is the ability to see more content on the screen at once. To take advantage of VSR, you’ll need a Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, or R9 285 discrete graphics card. Both single- and multi-GPU configurations are currently supported. VSR is essentially AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution. In addition, AMD is claiming performance enhancements in a number of top titles with these these new drivers. Reportedly, as little as 6 percent improvement in performance in FIFA Online to as much as a 29 percent increase in Batman: Arkham Origins can be gained when using an AMD 7000-Series APU, for example. On discrete GPUs, an AMD Radeon R9 290X’s performance increases ranged from 8 percent in Grid 2 to roughly 16 percent in Bioshock Infinity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Offers a Performance Boost, Over 20 New Features With Catalyst Omega Drivers
cold fjord writes: The Weekly Standard reports, “This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to ‘advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research.’ … Now that HHS has publicly released the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the agency is seeking the input from the public before implementation. The plan is subject to two-month period of public comment before finalization. The comment period runs through February 6, 2015.” Among the many agencies that will be sharing records besides Health and Human Services are: Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison, Department of Labor, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Personnel Management, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Feds Plan For 35 Agencies To Collect, Share, Use Health Records of Americans
angry tapir writes: If you patched your sites against a serious SSL flaw discovered in October you will have to check them again. Researchers have discovered that the POODLE vulnerability also affects implementations of the newer TLS protocol. The POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) vulnerability allows attackers who manage to intercept traffic between a user’s browser and an HTTPS website to decrypt sensitive information, like the user’s authentication cookies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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POODLE Flaw Returns, This Time Hitting TLS Protocol
Jason Koebler writes A new imaging technique is able to capture images at 100 billion frames per second—fast enough to watch light interact with objects, which could eventually lead to new cloaking technologies. The camera was developed by a team at Washington University in St. Louis—for the team’s first tests, it was able to visualize laser pulse reflections, photons racing through air and through resin, and “faster-than-light propagation of non-information.” It can also be used in conjunction with telescopes and to image optical and quantum communications, according to lead researcher Liang Gao. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Fastest Camera Ever Made Captures 100 Billion Frames Per Second
Molly McHugh writes with this story about sensors that can be attached to temporary tattoos to monitor various medical information. “The Center for Wearable Sensors at the University of California San Diego has been experimenting with attaching sensors to temporary tattoos in order to extract data from the body. The tattoos are worn exactly as a regular temporary tattoo would be worn. The sensors simply sit atop the skin without penetrating it and interact with Bluetooth or other wireless devices with a signal in order to send the data….A biofuel battery applied as a temporary tattoo converts sweat into energy, and a startup within the center has developed a strip that extracts data from sweat to explain how your body is reacting to certain types of exercise. Amay Bandodkar, a fourth year PhD student at UCSD, explains that the sensors are programmed to react to the amount of lactate the body produces.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How High-Tech Temporary Tattoos Will Hack Your Skin
jones_supa writes In past builds of Windows 10 Technical Preview there has been an interesting feature called Battery Saver, but for the time being it has been just a mockup. In a leaked build 9888, the code is now in place. Battery Saver, as the name implies, will help your mobile device make the most out of your battery. This feature works by limiting the background activity on your device when the mode is activated. You can turn the feature on any time but there is also a setting to have it automatically turn on when the battery capacity goes below a user-defined percentage. Considering that this build was not supposed to make its way out of Redmond and that the company is not releasing any new builds this year, this may be the best look we get until the Consumer Preview arrives. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Windows 10 Adds Battery Saver Feature
crookedvulture writes The SSD Endurance Experiment previously covered on Slashdot has reached another big milestone: two freaking petabytes of writes. That’s an astounding total for consumer-grade drives rated to survive no more than a few hundred terabytes. Only two of the initial six subjects made it to 2PB. The Kingston HyperX 3K, Intel 335 Series, and Samsung 840 Series expired on the road to 1PB, while the Corsair Neutron GTX faltered at 1.2PB. The Samsung 840 Pro continues despite logging thousands of reallocated sectors. It has remained completely error-free throughout the experiment, unlike a second HyperX, which has suffered a couple of uncorrectable errors. The second HyperX is mostly intact otherwise, though its built-in compression tech has reduced the 2PB of host writes to just 1.4PB of flash writes. Even accounting for compression, the flash in the second HyperX has proven to be far more robust than in the first. That difference highlights the impact normal manufacturing variances can have on flash wear. It also illustrates why the experiment’s sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions about the durability of specific models. However, the fact that all the drives far exceeded their endurance specifications bodes well for the endurance of consumer-grade SSDs in general. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Consumer-Grade SSDs Survive Two Petabytes of Writes
dcblogs writes: The Internet of Things (IoT) may be more significant in reshaping the competitive landscape than the arrival of the Internet. Its productivity potential is so powerful it will deliver a new era of prosperity. That’s the argument put forth by Michael Porter, an economist at the Harvard Business School and James Heppelmann, president and CEO of PTC, in a recent Harvard Business Review essay. PTC is a product design software firm that recently acquired machine-to-machine firm Axeda Corp. In the past 50 years, IT has delivered two major transformations or “waves, ” as the authors describe it. The first came in the 1960s and 1970s, with IT-enabled process automation, computer-aided design and manufacturing resource planning. The second was the Internet and everything it delivered. The third is IoT. That’s a strikingly sweeping claim and there will no doubt be contrarians to Porter and Heppelmann’s view. But what analysts are clear about is that IoT development today is at an early stage, perhaps at a point similar to 1995, the same year Amazon and eBay went online, followed by Netflix in 1997 and Google in 1998. People understood the trend at the time, but the big picture was still out of focus. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IoT Is the Third Big Technology ‘Wave’ In the Last 50 Years, Says Harvard