Tag: portfolio-cond

Lync-Skype video chat shown for the first time, coming later this year

Ever since Microsoft bought Skype in 2011, one of the biggest questions has been how the company would integrate the voice and video messaging service with its other voice and video messaging software: Lync. Last year, the company integrated the two systems for voice calling, allowing Lync users to talk to, and see the online status of, Skype users. This year, the company will take another big step toward bringing the systems together, with cross-network video calling. The company demonstrated Lync-to-Skype video calling at its Lync Conference today. The feature will go into a limited beta in summer or fall. In addition to improved interoperability with Skype, the company is also adding native interoperability with Cisco/Tandberg video conferencing systems. Joining its existing Lync clients for Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad, and Android phones, Microsoft says that it will have a Lync client for Android tablets available in the Google Play store by the end of June. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Lync-Skype video chat shown for the first time, coming later this year

Who needs sunlight? In Arizona, solar power never sleeps

Solana is currently the largest parabolic trough plant in the world, covering more than 1,900 acres in southern Arizona. 4 more images in gallery GILA BEND, ARIZONA—Every afternoon during the summer, millions of people across the American Southwest come home from work and switch on their air conditioners, straining the power grid in states like Arizona. Traditional solar power—although perfectly suited to the sunny climes of this region—can’t meet this demand since the surge in use peaks just as the day’s sun is disappearing. That’s why most power suppliers diversify, using electricity from different sources to meet local needs. Solar power is abundant in the middle of sunny, clear days, but energy from other sources—coal, nuclear, or hydroelectric power for example—is necessary at night or when the weather is bad. But increasingly efficient technology is allowing solar plants to contribute for a longer period of time each day and produce energy even in cloudy conditions. The key is a design that allows them to store the sun’s energy to be used later. And new facilities, such as the Solana power plant that recently came online in Gila Bend, Arizona, are increasing solar energy’s niche by producing electricity several hours after the sun sets. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Who needs sunlight? In Arizona, solar power never sleeps

US team to switch speed skating suits due to poor physics

Shani Davis wearing the Under Armour suit in question, in the race that placed him eighth overall. NBC The Under Armor speed skating suits meant to help US Olympic team members win may have actually been slowing them down, writes the Wall Street Journal in a report . A “design flaw” meant to aid with one element of the skaters’ physics may be hurting them in another way, resulting in no US skaters finishing higher than seventh place despite high rankings going in. The US requested a change on Thursday, and in the early hours of Saturday it was decided that the team could revert to the suits they used in previous World cup events, also made by Under Armour. The suits were designed with a vent on the back that is supposed to allow heat to escape. But the WSJ now suggests that the same vent may be letting air into the suit, creating drag and affecting skaters’ low stance. Kevin Haley, senior vice president of Under Armour, already copped to the problem, telling the WSJ “we’ll move heaven and earth to make them better.” Long-track team coach Ryan Shimabukuro refused to criticize the suits, but skater and 1,000-meter world-record holder Shani Davis claimed to have had his fastest start ever in the 1,000 meter race Wednesday while wearing the suit. An NBC commentator speaking over the event’s delayed broadcast in the US also asserted that the start was “the fastest [he’d] seen [Davis] open up this year.” Still, he finished eighth. Heather Richardson, the top-ranked women’s skater, finished seventh in the 1000m event; Brittany Bowe, the world record-holder for the same event, finished eighth. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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US team to switch speed skating suits due to poor physics

Windows 8.x reaches 200 million licenses sold

Microsoft marketing chief Tami Reller announced that the company has sold 200 million Windows 8 licenses in the 15 or so months that it has been on the market. This number includes only OEM and retail copies of the operating system and excludes volume licenses. The company previously announced that Windows 8 had reached 100 million copies sold in May of last year, a rate of sales that matched Windows 7. That operating system, however, reached 240 million sales within the first 12 months, demonstrating that Windows 8 is clearly not selling as fast. Still, in a PC market that’s shrinking—and which started shrinking even before the release of Windows 8—200 million copies is perhaps not too shabby. PCs as a whole are not selling as fast as they were during Windows 7’s heyday, and both Windows and Office are suffering as a result. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Windows 8.x reaches 200 million licenses sold

Skeleton from one of the earliest Americans yields its genome

The burial mound in Montana where the skeleton was found. Texas A&M University The peopling of the Americas via the Bering Sea land bridge is one of the more confusing events in recent history. Some of the earliest signs of human occupancy are actually in Chile. After that, the first distinct toolmaking culture, the Clovis people, appeared in the interior of North America, and rapidly swept across the continent. There are also indications that a separate migration occurred down the Pacific coast, possibly associated with people who had distinctive skeletal features, while the Inuit seem to be relatively recent arrivals. The sudden appearance of the Clovis toolset has caused some people to suggest that the Clovis were a distinct migration by a passage between ice sheets directly into North America’s interior. Others have even suggested that they arrived from Europe, brought by people who crossed the ice through Greenland (an idea that’s favored by a certain Bigfoot researcher ). Now, researchers have completed the genome of an individual who was buried with Clovis tools in Montana 12,500 years ago. The results suggest that the migration into North America was more unified than some thought. Although Clovis tools are relatively common at many North American sites, they’re generally not associated with skeletal remains. And there have been no distinctive skeletal features that label remains as belonging to a distinctive Clovis ethnic group. All of which makes Montana’s Anzick site exceptional: it contains remains that were placed with Clovis tools, unambiguously tagging the skeleton as belonging to this group. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Skeleton from one of the earliest Americans yields its genome

Giant leap for nuclear fusion as scientists get more energy out than fuel put in

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratroy Researchers in the US have overcome a key barrier to making nuclear fusion reactors a reality. In results published in Nature , scientists have shown that they can now produce more energy than the fuel put into an experiment. The use of fusion as a source of energy remains a long way off, but the latest development is an important step toward that goal. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun and billions of other stars in the universe. If mastered, it could provide an unlimited source of clean energy because the raw materials are plentiful and the operation produces no carbon emissions. During the fusion process, smaller atoms fuse into larger ones releasing huge amounts of energy. To achieve this on Earth, scientists have to create conditions similar to those at the center of the sun. This involves creating very high pressures and temperatures. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Giant leap for nuclear fusion as scientists get more energy out than fuel put in

Mini-desktops are a rare bright spot in a shrinking PC industry, says Intel

Intel’s Haswell NUC sitting on top of Gigabyte’s larger (but more powerful) Brix. Intel sees mini-PCs as one of the rare PC markets where growth is possible. Andrew Cunningham The wider PC industry isn’t doing so well, and last week’s news that Sony would be selling off its VAIO business is just the latest indication. That doesn’t mean things are all bad—there’s still some growth to be found, and one area where it’s happening is in mini-desktops like Intel’s NUC or Asus’ upcoming Chromebox . Intel tells us that sales of truly tiny PCs (things near the size of the NUC, Gigabyte’s Brix Pro , or Lenovo’s M93p Tiny ) have gone from “almost zero in 2012” to over a million units in 2013. And yet, these mini desktops don’t always make sense. If you want something compact for your desk that saves you cable clutter, an all-in-one will frequently be a better option. If you want something more powerful, a more traditional micro ATX or even mini ITX PC can be purchased or built for less money, often with a greater amount of CPU and GPU power. We spoke with Lisa Graff , Vice President of Intel’s PC Client Group, to get a better idea of how these desktops are doing and who exactly is buying them. Business-friendly features in a tiny package Graff came in from the datacenter group last year to run Intel’s desktop business.  “When I came in there were a number of areas in desktop that were growing, kind of bucking the trend of some of what we’re seeing in the PC business,” Graff told Ars. “And as we started to drill in, this was one of the areas—all-in-ones were clearly a growth area, but this mini-desktop, really, the growth has been incredibly strong.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Mini-desktops are a rare bright spot in a shrinking PC industry, says Intel

Biggest DDoS ever aimed at Cloudflare’s content delivery network

Ruthanne Reid A distributed denial-of-service attack targeting a client of the content delivery network Cloudflare reached new highs in malicious traffic today , striking at the company’s data centers in Europe and the US. According to a Twitter post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, the full volume of the attack exceeded 400 gigabits per second—making it the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. The attack used Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection , the same technique used in recent attacks against gaming sites by a group called DERP Trolling. NTP is used to synchronize the time settings on computers across the Internet. The attack made fraudulent synchronization requests to NTP servers that caused them to send a flood of replies back at the targeted sites. Reflection attacks have been a mainstay of DDoS tools and botnets, but the use of NTP in such attacks is relatively new. Last year’s attack on Spamhaus , which previously set the record for the largest DDoS ever, used a Domain Name Service (DNS) protocol attack—a much more common approach that takes advantage of the Internet’s directory service, forging requests for DNS lookups from the intended target and sending them to scores of open DNS servers. The size of the traffic directed back at the target from these requests far exceeds the size of the requests sent to the DNS servers, which is why the technique is often called a DNS amplification attack. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Biggest DDoS ever aimed at Cloudflare’s content delivery network

Spectacular new Martian impact crater spotted from orbit

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Yesterday, the team that runs the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released the photo shown above. It’s a new impact crater on Mars, formed sometime early this decade. The crater at the center is about 30 meters in diameter, and the material ejected during its formation extends out as far as 15 kilometers. The impact was originally spotted by the MRO’s Context Camera , a wide-field imaging system that (wait for it) provides the context—an image of the surrounding terrain—for the high-resolution images taken by HiRISE. The time window on the impact, between July 2010 and May 2012, simply represents the time between two different Context Camera photos of the same location. Once the crater was spotted, it took until November of 2013 for another pass of the region, at which point HiRISE was able to image it. Higher-resolution photos, as well as a map of the crater’s location on Mars, are available from the HiRISE website. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Spectacular new Martian impact crater spotted from orbit

New Google Chrome feature warns users when browser has been hijacked

Google engineers have added a new feature to the Chrome browser that automatically warns users when browsing settings have been altered by malicious software. The new protection was unveiled in a blog post published Friday by Linus Upson, Google’s vice president of engineering. It is designed to augment a feature introduced in October that allows users to return Chrome settings to a factory-fresh state with the click of a single button. Malicious code frequently included with screensavers and other free software can surreptitiously make any number of changes to Chrome settings. Injecting ads into webpages and blocking the ability to revert settings to those previously chosen by the user are two of the more common ways unscrupulous developers tamper with browser options. The hijackings were among the top issue users reported in Chrome help forums when the reset button was introduced in October. Upson explained: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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New Google Chrome feature warns users when browser has been hijacked