portfolio-cond – Page 31

Cable companies want to unbundle broadcast TV, and broadcasters are angry

Iain Watson A Congressional proposal to let cable and satellite customers choose which broadcast TV channels they pay for has led to a battle between small cable companies and broadcasters. While cable companies usually are opponents of mandates to sell channels individually instead of in bundles , in this case they are fighting for à la carte and against the broadcasters. The “Local Choice” proposal by US Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) affects local broadcast stations such as affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. A group called TVfreedom.org that represents local broadcasters and other organizations today criticized the American Cable Association (ACA) for supporting Local Choice. “We believe ‘Local Choice’ represents a frontal assault on free and local TV broadcasting,” TVfreedom Public Affairs Director Robert Kenny wrote . “It would tilt television’s balance of power in favor of pay-TV providers at the expense of broadcasters invested in localism. It would cost consumers more on their monthly bills, and do nothing to address shoddy pay-TV service or the deceptive billing practices of cable and satellite TV providers.” TVfreedom is composed of “local broadcasters, community advocates, network television affiliate associations, multicast networks, manufacturers and other independent broadcaster-related organizations” and says its mission is to make sure “cable and satellite TV providers [are] held accountable for stifling innovation and repeatedly using their own customers as bargaining chips while increasing their record profits.” The group chided the ACA for supporting à la carte pricing this year despite arguing in a previous case that “Current technology costs make à la carte a financial impossibility for ACA member systems, the business model is entirely unproven, and no lawful basis exists for imposing regulated a la carte.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Epic makes Unreal Engine 4 free for students

On Thursday, Epic Games announced that it would make the complete Unreal Engine 4 suite free to use for universities and students on a case-by-case basis. Interested teachers and students can now submit their credentials via Epic’s official site , and upon acceptance, they will have access to the suite without having to pay the standard $19 per month fee . “There’s no separate ‘academic’ version or anything like that,” UE4 General Manager Ray Davis said to Ars in a phone interview. “The cool thing is, as a student, even if you don’t decide to subscribe upon graduation, you’ll still retain access to any version of the engine you had at that point. We’re not leaving people hanging at the end of a school year or anything like that.” Though UE4’s university-specific offer isn’t quite as accessible as Crytek’s CryENGINE, which can be downloaded by anybody on a non-commercial basis, Epic’s revision does stem from feedback the company received after it announced UE4’s pricing structure during this year’s Game Developers Conference . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic makes Unreal Engine 4 free for students

Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Robyn Lee On Tuesday, a California appeals court ruled that Yelp’s ad sales strategies do not extort small businesses and merely amount to “hard bargaining” by the company. Yelp lets anyone review a business, and businesses can’t opt out of being reviewed. So when Yelp’s ad sales team began calling around asking companies to buy advertising in exchange for displaying good reviews more prominently, some storefronts cried foul. In 2010, four small business owners banded together to sue Yelp for extortion after they refused to buy advertising from Yelp and allegedly found that bad reviews were displayed more prominently. Two of the business owners also alleged that Yelp authored negative reviews to induce them to advertise or in retaliation after the business declined to buy advertising. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Appeals court says Yelp’s ad sales tactics don’t extort small businesses

Haswell-E arrives, bringing a $999 8-core desktop CPU with it

Most of Intel’s announcements lately have focused on low-power chips, but every now and again it throws a bone to its high-end desktop users. Today we’re getting our first look at Haswell-E and a new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, a moniker reserved for the biggest and fastest of Intel’s consumer and workstation CPUs (if you want something faster than that, you’ll need to start looking at Xeons). We already got a little bit of information on these chips back in March , when Intel made announcements related to refreshed Haswell chips (“Devil’s Canyon”) and a handful of other desktop processors. Though much of today’s information has already leaked, we’ll run down the most important stuff for those of you who don’t follow every leaked slide that makes its way to the public. The CPUs Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Within four days of the first public reports of a major flaw in OpenSSL’s software for securing communications on the Internet, mass attacks searched for and targeted vulnerable servers. In a report released this week, IBM found that while the attacks have died down, approximately half of the original 500,000 potentially vulnerable servers remain unpatched, leaving businesses at continuing risk of the Heartbleed flaw. On average, the company currently sees 7,000 daily attacks against its customers, down from a high of 300,000 attacks in a single 24-hour period in April, according to the report based on data from the company’s Managed Security Services division. “Despite the initial rush to patch systems, approximately 50 percent of potentially vulnerable servers have been left unpatched—making Heartbleed an ongoing, critical threat,” the report stated. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

A simulated map of the WiFi signal in Jason Cole’s two-bedroom apartment. Jason Cole A home’s Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation . The Helmholtz equation models “the propagation of electronic waves” that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces. The author of the post in question , Jason Cole, first solved the equation in two dimensions, and then applied it to his apartment’s long and narrow two-bedroom layout. He wrote that he took his walls to have a very high refractive index, while empty space had a refractive index of 1. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says

A sixth-generation iPod Nano embedded in a watch band. Aaron Muszalski Re/code is reporting that Apple will introduce a wearable device on September 9 alongside two next-generation iPhones. Such a device from Apple has been highly anticipated since the wearable market received newcomers from Samsung, LG, and Motorola . Apple’s entry into this market was originally expected sometime in October based on an earlier report from Re/code. The site has had a good track record of correctly predicting the timing of Apple product releases since the AllThingsD days. John Paczkowski, who reported the news, says that the coming device will certainly be equipped to make use of Apple’s HealthKit platform for its Health app, as well as HomeKit, which is a platform to connect devices to smart appliances and light bulbs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says

Jawbone opens a window to our humanity-tracking future

Jawbone’s graph of users who were woken up by the earthquake in California early Sunday. Jawbone Wearable computing company Jawbone released a graph on Monday showing its users being woken up by the 6.0-magnitude earthquake centered in the Napa Valley region of California on Sunday morning. 120 people were injured, a lot of wine went to waste, and a few people wearing Jawbone’s Up fitness bands lost some sleep, according to a huge spike in the percentage of users who were up and moving in affected regions at about 3:20am (close to 80 percent in Berkeley, Vallejo, and Napa Valley itself). The graph accurately plots the nexus of the earthquake, with smaller spikes of activity in more distant regions, including San Francisco and Oakland (around 60 percent of users), Sacramento and San Jose (25 percent), and Modesto and Santa Cruz, with only a tiny bump of a few percent from the baseline. Together, the locations form a basic map of the earthquake’s reach, not dependent on scientific measurements and existing equipment waiting for a disaster, but just a large, distributed population wearing tracking devices . The Up bands don’t collect location data themselves, so they can’t pinpoint where a user was asleep with perfect certainty. Rather, the data is based on the locations logged by the app used to store users’ information, which always records a user’s location when the app is opened. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Jawbone opens a window to our humanity-tracking future

More Windows 9 rumors: one-click upgrades, interactive tiles, notification center

Rumors about the next major version of Windows continue to trickle out in the run up to an anticipated public preview in September. Neowin reports that internal builds of the operating system currently sport a one-click upgrade feature to update from one build to the next. While there’s no guarantee that such a feature will necessarily ship, it would be consistent with Microsoft’s move to more rapid releases and continuous improvement rather than infrequent major updates. Currently, upgrading Windows is a major undertaking. During betas and previews, there’s often no good ability to move from one build to the next without performing a full reinstall. Even when moving between stable versions, upgrading can be failure-prone and time-consuming. While it’s possible that the upgrade capability will be limited to previews, it looks like a strong indication that Microsoft wants to make this process easier. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

According to the slides, there will be three new NUC boards spread across give different boxes, all launching in the first half of 2015. FanlessTech We’re generally fans of Intel’s NUC (“Next Unit of Computing”) mini-PCs, which use Ultrabook parts to create reasonably capable desktop PCs that can fit just about anywhere. When last we heard about new Broadwell-based versions of the boxes, they were due to launch in late 2014, but delays of higher-performance Broadwell parts has apparently pushed them back. New Intel slides from FanlessTech now show seven new NUC boxes launching in the first half of 2015. The slides also tell us what kind of boxes we can expect, though there are no big surprises here; the Broadwell NUC lineup is broadly similar to that of Haswell. There appear to be three boards: one high-end Core i5 model, one middle-end Core i3 model, and one Core i5 model with Intel’s vPro technology integrated to make it more appealing to enterprises. All appear to come in two types of enclosures, one with extra room for a 2.5-inch SATA III hard drive and one without. This makes for a total of six Broadwell NUC boxes. The revised NUC roadmap. FanlessTech All six boxes will share most of the same ports and features: two display outputs, Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, NFC, M.2 slots for SSDs, support for up to 16GB of RAM, and changeable lids (these may just be for customization purposes, though past rumors have suggested that some could be used as wireless charging pads). The vPro models will use two mini DisplayPorts while the standard i5 and i3 boxes will use one mini DisplayPort and one micro HDMI port, and all models appear to come with Intel’s 7265 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 adapter soldered on—with current models, you must supply your own mini-PCI Express Wi-Fi card. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

Ken May

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