Tag: photography

An Absolutely Massive Volcano Is Exploding In Chile Right Now

Calbuco , a stratovolcano in southern Chile, began erupting yesterday at 7pm local time. First spewing massive ash clouds then, at 10pm, erupting explosively as its fragile structure collapsed inwards. Here’s all the stunning imagery and video; we’ll keep it updated as this develops. You can see it from space! Read more…

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An Absolutely Massive Volcano Is Exploding In Chile Right Now

Intel’s Compute Stick: A full PC that’s tiny in size (and performance)

Specs at a glance: Intel Compute Stick STCK1A32WFC OS Windows 8.1 with Bing 32-bit CPU 1.33GHz quad-core Intel Atom Z3735F (Turbo Boost up to 1.83GHz) RAM 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 (non upgradeable) GPU Intel HD Graphics (integrated) HDD 32GB eMMC SSD Networking 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports 1x USB 2.0, microSD, micro USB (for power) Size 4.06” x 1.46” x 0.47” (103 x 37 x 12mm) Other perks Lock slot Warranty 1 year Price ~$150, ~$110 for Ubuntu Linux version with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage Our appreciation of mini desktop PCs is well-documented at this point . In the age of the smartphone and the two-pound laptop, the desktop PC is perhaps the least exciting of computing devices, but there are still plenty of hulking desktop towers out there, and many of them can be replaced by something you can hold in the palm of your hand. Intel’s new Compute Stick, available for about $150 with Windows 8.1 and $110 with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, takes the mini desktop concept about as far as it can go. The Stick isn’t even really a “desktop” in the traditional sense, since it’s an HDMI dongle that hangs off the back of your monitor instead of sitting on your desk. It’s not very powerful, but the Compute Stick is one of the smallest Windows desktops you can buy right now. Let’s take a quick look at what it’s capable of. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s Compute Stick: A full PC that’s tiny in size (and performance)

Watch Olympus’ Dope Image Stabilization Work Like Magic

Olympus’ 5-axis image stabilization is some of the best out there. The system makes images that would ordinarily be too blurry to use suddenly shake-free. This video captures a view of what the system looks like under the hood. It’s hypnotizing. Read more…

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Watch Olympus’ Dope Image Stabilization Work Like Magic

First look at Project Spartan, Microsoft’s take on the modern browser

When announcing that a Windows 10 Preview with the new Project Spartan browser was available , Microsoft made clear that the browser ain’t done yet. What we have now is an early iteration of the company’s take on a legacy-free forward-looking browser—a browser that’s going to ditch the venerable Internet Explorer name. Superficially, everything about the browser is new. Its interface takes cues from all the competition: tabs on top, in the title bar, the address bar inside each tab. The look is simple and unadorned; monochrome line-art for icons, rectangular tabs, and a flat look—the address bar, for example, doesn’t live in a recessed pit (as it does in Chrome) and is integral with the toolbar (unlike Internet Explorer). The design concept works well for me, though I doubt this will be universal. As is so often the case on Windows, it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the operating system. While parts of Windows 10 have a similar appearance—most notably the Settings app—Windows overall remains an inconsistent mish-mash of looks and feels, to its detriment. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First look at Project Spartan, Microsoft’s take on the modern browser

A look at Android 5.1: speed, security, tweaks

Four months after the first release of Android 5.0 Lollipop , Google has followed up with a second version: Android 5.1. The speedy turnaround time compared to Android 5.0 (which appeared a year after 4.4) means that there aren’t many large-scale changes to look at—but the release does feature numerous little improvements and tweaks. It’s faster! (on the Nexus 6, at least) Ron Amadeo 5.1 brings much faster random read and write speeds to the Nexus 6, and the Nexus 5 improves a little, too. 3 more images in gallery 5.1 seems to have eliminated many of the performance issues with the Nexus 6. When we initially reviewed the device, the Nexus 6 was slower at loading apps and switching tasks than the older Nexus 5 had been. With 5.1, the newer phone feels much snappier; with non-game apps, it can now keep pace with the Nexus 5. On benchmarks, we’re seeing much higher random read and write scores on the Nexus 6 with 5.1; random read gets a 2x speed boost, while random write is a whopping 9x faster. The same dramatic speed boosts aren’t present on the Nexus 5, and we suspect the difference is that the Nexus 6 is encrypted while the Nexus 5 is not. According to Francisco Franco , a longtime third-party Android kernel developer, Google is now using NEON instructions on the Nexus 6 to speed up encryption performance. Performance could be further improved by enabling hardware-accelerated encryption, which the Nexus 6 still doesn’t use, but Google has been experimenting with the feature in the Android Open Source Project. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A look at Android 5.1: speed, security, tweaks

Office for Mac 2016 hands-on: A vital upgrade, with some kinks to work out

The starting point when you open the new Word for Mac looks a lot more like the Windows version than it used to. 14 more images in gallery Office for Mac has often played second fiddle to the flagship Windows version that powers Microsoft’s productivity software empire, but it’s important for plenty of computer users nonetheless. It’s thus good to see Microsoft nearly finished with a long-awaited update that brings the OS X and Windows versions of Office closer together in style, while adding integrations with Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage. A preview version of Office for Mac 2016 was released today , and there’s enough to give Mac users reason to look forward to the final bits and reminders of bugginess that can afflict Microsoft software for the Mac. The preview for OS X Yosemite is free to download and use  until its official release in the second half of 2015. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. We’ve already covered the Outlook and OneNote  redesigns, so we’ll just focus on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in this brief hands-on. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Office for Mac 2016 hands-on: A vital upgrade, with some kinks to work out

VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

VESA, the standards body responsible for such luminary technologies as DisplayPort and the omnipresent VESA monitor mount, has published the specification for version 1.4a of Embedded DisplayPort (eDP). The new standard builds upon DisplayPort 1.3, which was published at the end of 2014. In short, eDP 1.4a allows for laptops, smartphones, tablets, and all-in-ones with 8K displays (7680×4320) or high-frequency (120Hz) 4K displays—but it includes a few other neat features, too. eDP 1.4a appears to be almost entirely based on DisplayPort 1.3—which was published in September 2014—with a couple of new features thrown in for good measure. eDP 1.4a specifies four high-speed (HBR3) lanes between the graphics adapter and display, with each lane capable of 8.1Gbps; the lanes can either be used individually, in pairs (more on that later), or all together for a total theoretical bandwidth of 32.4Gbps. That’s enough bandwidth to drive a 4K display (3840×2160) at 120Hz with 10-bit color or an 8K display at 60Hz. Beyond higher bandwidth, one of the more interesting features of eDP 1.4a is Direct Stream Compression (DSC), a standard developed by VESA and MIPI that—as the name implies—compresses the output video signal. According to VESA, the compression is “visually lossless” (i.e., it is lossy, but your games won’t suddenly look like a hand-me-down JPEG). VESA and MIPI say that DSC can reduce the component cost and power consumption of high-resolution displays—a claim that obviously needs to be confirmed once eDP 1.4a devices start shipping. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

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

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Palm-sized pwnage: Ars tests the Pwn Plug R3