An anonymous reader writes “Until now, it was particularly difficult to obtain reliable figures on the results of the Android operating system in China. Indeed, there is no ‘centralized app store’ and most smartphones sold in the country do not use Google services, including activation. In fact, it is very difficult to know the actual results. The search engine Baidu has corrected this by publishing a report on trends in the mobile internet for the 3rd quarter 2013. It appears that there would be now 270 million active users of the Google platform in the country (more than 20% of the total population). Growth would, however, decrease with a small 13% against 55% for the same period last year but up 10% compared to Q2 2013.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tag: management
Research Suggests One To Three Men Fathered Most Western Europeans
Taco Cowboy writes “‘While the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups in Africa took 12 thousand years to spread, those in Europe started from around 3rd millennium.’ The speed of spread of the European haplogroups was totally astounding, to say the least. ‘There was no R1b found in Europe before a Bell Beaker site from the 3rd millennium BC and today many Europeans (most in western Europe) belong to this haplogroup. ‘We used coalescent simulations to investigate the range of demographic models most likely to produce the phylogenetic structures observed in Africa and Europe, assessing the starting and ending genetic effective population sizes, duration of the expansion, and time when expansion ended. The best-fitting models in Africa and Europe are very different. In Africa, the expansion took about 12 thousand years, ending very recently; it started from approximately 40 men and numbers expanded approximately 50-fold. In Europe, the expansion was much more rapid, taking only a few generations and occurring as soon as the major R1b lineage entered Europe; it started from just one to three men, whose numbers expanded more than a thousandfold.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Research Suggests One To Three Men Fathered Most Western Europeans
Intel Linux Driver Now Nearly As Fast As Windows OpenGL Driver
An anonymous reader writes “Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver is now running neck-and-neck with the Windows 8.1 driver for OpenGL performance between the competing platforms when using the latest drivers for each platform. The NVIDIA driver has long been able to run at similar speeds between Windows and Linux given the common code-base, but the Intel Linux driver is completely separate from their Windows driver due to being open-source and complying with the Linux DRM and Mesa infrastructure. The Intel Linux driver is still trailing the Windows OpenGL driver in supporting OpenGL4.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Linux Driver Now Nearly As Fast As Windows OpenGL Driver
62% of 16 To 24-Year-Olds Prefer Printed Books Over eBooks
assertation writes “According to The Guardian, 62% of readers between the age of 16 and 24 prefer physical copies of books over ebooks. Reasons given were the feel of ‘real books, ‘ a perceived unfairly high cost for eBooks, and the ease of sharing printed books. ‘On questions of ebook pricing, 28% think that ebooks should be half their current price, while just 8% say that ebook pricing is right.’ The preference for physical copies was in contrast to other forms of media, such as games, movies, and music, where a majority preferred the digital version.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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62% of 16 To 24-Year-Olds Prefer Printed Books Over eBooks
Futuremark Delists Samsung and HTC Android Devices for Cheating 3DMark
MojoKid writes “Benchmarks are serious business. Buying decisions are often made based on how well a product scores, which is why the press and analysts spend so much time putting new gadgets through their paces. However, benchmarks are only meaningful when there’s a level playing field, and when companies try to ‘game’ the business of benchmarking, it’s not only a form of cheating, it also bamboozles potential buyers who (rightfully) assume the numbers are supposed mean something. 3D graphics benchmark software developer Futuremark just ‘delisted’ a bunch of devices from its 3DMark benchmark results database because it suspects foul play is at hand. Of the devices listed, it appears Samsung and HTC in particular are indirectly being accused of cheating 3DMark for mobile devices. Delisted devices are stripped of their rank and scores. Futuremark didn’t elaborate on which specific rule(s) these devices broke, but a look at the company’s benchmarking policies reveals that hardware makers aren’t allowed to make optimizations specific to 3DMark, nor are platforms allowed to detect the launch of the benchmark executable unless it’s needed to enable multi-GPU and/or there’s a known conflict that would prevent it from running.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Futuremark Delists Samsung and HTC Android Devices for Cheating 3DMark
A Co-processor No More, Intel’s Xeon Phi Will Be Its Own CPU As Well
An anonymous reader writes “The Xeon Phi co-processor requires a Xeon CPU to operate… for now. The next generation of Xeon Phi, codenamed Knights Landing and due in 2015, will be its own CPU and accelerator. This will free up a lot of space in the server but more important, it eliminates the buses between CPU memory and co-processor memory, which will translate to much faster performance even before we get to chip improvements. ITworld has a look.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A Co-processor No More, Intel’s Xeon Phi Will Be Its Own CPU As Well
Failed Software Upgrade Halts Transit Service
linuxwrangler writes “San Francisco Bay Area commuters awoke this morning to the news that BART, the major regional transit system which carries hundreds of thousands of daily riders, was entirely shut down due to a computer failure. Commuters stood stranded at stations and traffic backed up as residents took to the roads. The system has returned to service and BART says the outage resulted from a botched software upgrade.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Failed Software Upgrade Halts Transit Service
Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score
Jah-Wren Ryel writes “Yes, there’s yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will affect the kinds of services you’re offered. Based out of L.A.’s ‘Silicon Beach, ‘ Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar ‘verify that you received this code’ texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score
Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B
Lucas123 writes “Google just announced it is investing another $80 million in six new solar power plants in California and Arizona, bringing its total investment in renewable energy to more than $1 billion. The new plants are expected to generate 160MW of electricity, enough to power 17, 000 typical U.S. homes. They are expected to be operational by early 2014. With the new plants, Google’s renewable power facilities will be able to generate a total of 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500, 000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, it said. Currently, Google gets about 20% of its power from renewable energy, but it has set a goal of achieving 100% renewable energy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B
MIT’s Dynamic Shape Display is Like a Sandbox in California that You Can Manipulate from New York
Those of you who’ve seen The Wolverine , remember that crazy self-adjusting gurney thing that Master Yashida was lying on? That might not be as far off a piece of technology as you’d think. A team of researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group have created this mind-blowing Dynamic Shape Display with a similar vertical-pixel-grid set-up: Called inFORM , the system provides a fascinating way for one party to physically manipulate objects at the other’s location. It has to be seen in action to be believed: (more…)
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MIT’s Dynamic Shape Display is Like a Sandbox in California that You Can Manipulate from New York